A bunch of us participated in Extra Life, an annual charity event to raise money for local children’s hospitals. The event was organized by a collaboration between Boston Indies and the Tap Lab, and was hosted at Intrepid Labs in Cambridge!
The community came together to raise $2,087! It was an awesome day of gaming, both digital and tabletop. Thanks to everyone who attended!
For more information, view the Boston Indies Extra Life team page.
jamBOX is a recurring week-long game jam that aims to get developers to take a short break from their current work and provide some open source assets and projects to support the greater gamedev community.
Key Music: Musicians have created multiple packs of both music and effects to use in a game, you must use at least one pack when creating your game. Try to create the strongest connection between gameplay and your audio selections!
All the details for the event will be placed in this Google Doc as they become available.
jamBOX is a recurring week-long game jam that aims to get developers to take a short break from their current work and provide some open source assets and projects to support the greater gamedev community.
Multiplayer: Simply put, make a multiplayer game. Choose one or more of the additional sub-constraints if you want to give yourself a bit more challenge.
1P2P: One pad, two players. Create a two player game that only uses one game controller — preferably a game pad. 2P4P works, too.
MMLo: Massive Multiplayer Local. Your game supports at least 8 players.
All the details for the event will be placed in this Google Doc as they become available.
jamBOX is a recurring week-long game jam that aims to get developers to take a short break from their current work and provide some open source assets and projects to support the greater gamedev community.
96px: You must create a game where one dimension of the game resolution of the game is no wider than 96px. If you choose to or are required to create an overall resolution that is larger than 96px in one dimension for your build, you may only place non-interactive text outside the game resolution.
All the details for the event will be placed in this Google Doc as they become available.
For the first three weeks of November, members of the Indie Game Collective are going to be doing three one-week game jams, and we want you to join us for any, or all of them!
Week 1 (Nov 4-8): 96px
The interactive resolution of your game must have one dimension that is only 96px wide. Your overall screen resolution may extend larger than that, but the only thing that you can place outside of your interactive area is text, and that text cannot be interacted with by any means of user control.
Week 2 (Nov 11-15): Multiplayer
Simply stated: create an experience that requires more than one player.
Week 3 (Nov 18-22): Music First
Musicians will provide packs of both effects and at least one piece of music. They’ll pitch their pack, include ideas on how we might implement it, and then the engineers, artists and designers take the packs and run with it.
We only have a few rules:
All assets (art, audio, code) that are contributed to the jamBOX must be completely open-sourced and usable in commercial projects. You may license the assets with either the CC0, CC-BY, or MIT license.
You can spend no more than 40 hours per-person on what you contribute.
Teams can be of any size.
If you’re interested in taking part, watch our blog for a post on the Monday of each week — we’ll kick it off with a public Google Doc that will include all of the teams pitches, along with any needs that need to be filled.
We hope to create a bunch of new projects to get everyone inspired and involved in game development.
See you on Monday!
This PAX East is turning out to be quite an exciting one, with a large amount of our studios showing games off at the Indie MegaBooth!
Our titles include:
After that, most of us are heading out to San Francisco to the annual Game Developers Conference. See everyone in a week!
Dejobaan’s Ichiro Lambe spoke at GDC China in Shanghai this past month. The focus was on starting an independent studio, and the talk touched on 9 common pitfalls that plague all new small game dev businesses. Gamasutra posted a writeup of the talk:
Ichiro Lambe has learned a lot of hard lessons since he founded independent studio Dejobaan (AaaAAAAAaaaaA: A Reckless Disregard For Gravity) over twelve years ago. At a talk at the Indie Game Summit this week at GDC China, Lambe whittled these down to the nine common pitfalls that most indie studios are in danger of facing.
Spoiler: Don’t do a 3-person MMORPG as your first title.
Ichiro Lambe of Boston studio Dejobaan will speak about Procedural Content Generation (PCG) on November 14th at the 2012 Montreal International Game Summit. The Procedural Content Generation wiki defines “PGC” thusly:
Procedural content generation (PCG) is the programmatic generation of game content using a random or pseudo-random process that results in an unpredictable range of possible game play spaces.
It’s both the Holy Grail and flying car of video games — a panacea always 5 years off. What’s the hold-up, why will PCG be vital to us over the next 10 years, and why should you be thinking more seriously about it in your game design? Dejobaan has used PCG within its award-winning 2009 indie title, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, and has been developing techniques for its upcoming, entirely procedurally-generated Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby.
