Yesterday was the final day of the Global Game Jam here at Miami, and saw each of our five teams working madly (and blearily) toward completion of their games. As the participants — fueled by doughnuts — caught their third (or fourth or fifth) wind, the games started coming together.

Art and sound assets were put into the games, games were playtested (as much as they could be in the little time remaining), and levels were tweaked.

After lunch, Johnny Wilson (who had been around to talk with the Global Game Jam attendees all weekend) gave his thoughts on the usefulness of these kinds of events and his impressions of where game design is going to go in the upcoming years — encouraging participants to think of themselves as the future of game design.

(By the way, my inclusion of this slide of Wilson’s doesn’t mean I condone all of the sentiments on it; take a look at the rest of my site to see that I think the “quibbling about unimportant details” that gamers do online is much more important and significant than Wilson apparently does. But that’s a debate for a different time).

So, this brings us to the games. Every team completed something they could show the Miami group as well as upload to Global Game Jam games gallery. This alone is impressive, but the polish on some of these games was, frankly, stunning. Here’s a bit on each of the games created during our Global Game Jam, as well as links to the games if you’d like to try them out.

Remember — as we were in the Eastern time zone, each of the groups was tasked with making a game that fit the theme of “Deception” while also incorporating as many of the three time-zone specific constraints (“Rain,” “Plain,” “Spain”) as possible. On top of that, each of the groups seemed excited by the chance to try to fit various “Achievements” offered up by the GGJ organizers, involving adding tweaks (e.g., creating a tutorial as part of the game, implementing an alternate control scheme to the game, etc.).

Spaniard in Space!

This won our “Best in Show” for all of the five games developed over the weekend, and is essentially a side-scroller in which you play a robot sent to Pluto by the Spanish government to claim the planet for Spain. I won’t spoil how “deception” is worked into this game (and I’m not totally thrilled with this part of the game), but this game has such polish, such humor, and such a good use of an in-game tutorial, that all of the judges agreed it was clearly one of our site’s top games. Beautifully rendered 3D backgrounds for a sidescroller and some clever level design, incorporating Spain (the origin of the robot), Rain (a rain gun wielded by the robot), and a few of the achievements. Very nicely done game, developed in GameMaker.

A link to: Spaniard in Space.

Project Boondoggle

This group was probably the most ambitious of the set, attempting to incorporate “deception” into a real-time strategy game/god game mix. Players are essentially a capricious god that manipulate two sides (the “Skullys” and the “Leafys”) in a hopefully eternal struggle — like, say, a Tetris type game, the goal isn’t for one side to win, but for the player to last as long as possible in keeping the two sides fighting one another. An interesting idea, although “deception” got a little lost along the way: I suspect their plan was for you, as the capricious god, to be deceiving both sides into thinking the other is the enemy, rather than you, the player who is actually controlling their fate. It didn’t quite come together (they had difficulties getting it to work in the final presentation of games), but wow, what a great concept, and they have the beginnings of a very interesting, innovative game, also put together in GameMaker (which none of the group had ever used before Friday).

A link to: Project Boondoggle.

Alien Seduction

In this game, the player controls a kid whose school is being invaded by aliens. The kid quickly realizes that a special megaphone he has will lure the aliens toward him, which he uses to deceive and lure the aliens to their doom in specific areas of the map. But, if the aliens get too close to the kid, they’ll pounce and kill him. This game had my favorite control scheme of all the games, by far — using the keyboard to move and the computer’s microphone to control the megaphone. They designed it so that amplitude from the mic would control the radius of the megaphone’s impact, and thus made a great start at some novel game mechanics, implemented using Processing.

A link to: Alien Seduction.

Ellobro

In terms of implementation, I’m still a bit astounded at the technical task these participants took on … and succeeded. The game is essentially a stealth game (hence deception) in which the player needs to evade the Spanish Inquisition (therefore, Spain) through a number of levels without being noticed and caught. Implementing it in C# and XNA, they showed how much can be done using sophisticated dev tools in just a short weekend — this could be, potentially, exported out to run on an Xbox 360, something none of the other groups accomplished. Nice job!

A link to: Ellobro.

Dino-Quixote

First, an apology that I didn’t manage to get a picture of Dino-Quixote as they were presenting it. But, in some ways, this was my favorite implementation of the theme of “deception” as a core game mechanic — in this game, the player controls a robot sent to a planet of dinosaurs and needs to traverse the map, exploring the planet. However, dinosaurs block his way and through the use of a DNA replicating device, the robot can take on the appearance (hence, deception) of any of the different dinosaurs. What’s great about this is that deception becomes something you need to learn how to do in order to solve the puzzles of each level — some spaces are only traversable with a smaller dinosaur, some small dinosaurs are only avoidable if you’re pretending to be a bigger, scarier dinosaur, etc. Wonderful attention spent on level design and making deception a key thing that you need to learn how to do at specific times in the game, also implemented in GameMaker.

A link to: Dino-Quixote.

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We all had a fantastic time and will definitely be doing this again at Miami, bigger and better next time! The support of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and other parts of the University have been phenomenal. This is going to be a regular event at Miami, and if you stumble upon this blog post and are interested in finding out more about Miami’s Global Game Jam efforts or our Game Studies program, please feel free to post a comment, email me, look me up on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Finally, I leave you with the opening keynote by Ste Curran for the Global Game Jam, which was put up by the GGJ organizers on YouTube. It’s a great introduction to why the Global Game Jam is a great thing, and why all of you who didn’t participate this year should give it a shot next time.