On the second day of the Global Game Jam, I had much less to report — not for lack of interesting things going on, but, because, after a point, the training wheels were off and every team was deep into development mode — today’s recap is mainly pictures, with a little connective text.

I showed up at a beautiful and cold Benton Hall just before breakfast arrived.

It seemed many of the teams had been working straight through the night; a few were asleep off in a corner while others quietly worked, with the remnants of more protyping on nearby tables.

I was impressed that most of the groups had, overnight, fleshed out a working skeleton for their games. Three of the games were being implemented in GameMaker, one in XNA, and one in Processing. The Processing game had a few particularly ambitious elements, including a control scheme based off of the computer’s microphone — overnight, they’d hashed out a basic structure for the gameplay and by yesterday morning, were working hard on implementing the audio control scheme as well as designing and applying sprites to flesh out the abstract design of the game.

At the same time, one of the groups went to town on GameMaker and, using the free set of sprites provided by the School of Fine Arts, had already begun designing levels for their game. Involving dinosaurs, robots, and DNA-theft to impersonate other dinosaurs, their game was the most developed by morning.

That is, of course, not to say they weren’t still very hard at work, using Maya to design 3D characters to turn into the playable sprites atop the 2D map of the game.

In the second day, most of the teams had started devoting a great amount of time to fleshing out the look and feel of their games — some of which began to look quite sophisticated. One team was 3D rendering the background of their sidescroller, while the team working on the real time strategy/god game began putting cute faces on the abstract units the game would contain.

Finally, by mid-afternoon, a number of the teams had playable levels for us to check out. We explored a bit of the robots/dinosaurs game, and gave some critiques for refining and shaping the game’s level design. But, not a whole lot! Some of these teams seemed like they were well underway and just needed to start working on polish.

I left for a few hours and came back in the evening to see if I could help out/playtest/offer any useful comments, but most all of the teams had their noses down in work. Time’s running out and the teams realize it — another all-nighter, perhaps, but one in which most of the teams were moving from working frameworks to incorporating all the visual and audio assets. I’m about to head into school and see where everyone’s at.

Our groups are going to submit their games to the Global Game Jam site by noon, Eastern (we hope). So, just a few more hours!

(By the way, this is my blog’s 100th post. Wow, that took a while, huh?)