Adventure Club Games is releasing the alpha of our newest game: Hamster Express.
Hamster Express is a physics puzzler in which you must help Hamlet the hamster navigate from train car to train car. Brake and accelerate the train to control Hamlet’s momentum and avoid the luggage and luggage racks.
Hamster Express Includes:
About 1 month ago (August 27th, 2012), the ACG co-founders decided to take a little “retreat” to recharge ourselves and instead of doing trust falls and ropes courses, we decided to make it a game jam retreat. We’ve talked about game jams a few times on here before so if you’re still not sure what it is please click this link.
Scheduling
We had talked about doing a game jam for a little while as a company but it unfortunately kept getting pushed back because of other projects or everyone’s schedules not matching up. Instead in mid July we decided to pick a date, during the week and chose that time to have our game jam.
This past weekend, Mike and I participated in the Adventure Time Game Jam, an Adventure Time themed 48 hour game making bonanza! But we decided to mix some things up and try to make a non video game. So, on Friday, we embarked on making an Adventure Time Card Game, as we really love card games, including poker and other casino games you can find in the new casinos site online, which are a great option for this.
Here’s a rundown of the good and bad and how it compares to making video games.
As designers, we are never really confined to a computer. Game design is never limited to a virtual space. So we wanted to dip our toe in the water of the tabletop. Turns out the water is just fine, and we learned a lot about making card games and games in general.
Check out the game here for some context!
Many of you may have heard at one time or another about how Walt Disney was a mediocre artist, truthfully he may have been, but he did have an eye for talent and the wits to take advantage of a difficult financial time. To Disney, the great depression meant the opportunity to hire up some of the most talented and promising recent graduates of the nation’s finest art schools. This core group of “9 Old Men” as they would later come to be known pioneered the uncharted depths of animation. Continue reading
When it came time to talk level generation for the Adventure Jam: Summer 2012 game “Balloon Chase” we had a good amount of discussion of how we wanted to go about it. We knew that the level would be broken into randomized segments made out of a set of tiles and that’s about the only constraint we had. So from there we discussed doing it as CSV (comma separated values) by hand or exporting from excel, but then we decided it could potentially get ugly picking symbols for all the different tiles we wanted to implement. From there we took the logical leap to do it by colors and the obvious tool for this task was MS Paint. By no means did we pioneer this technique, the first time Jordan and I saw it in action was from Notch during a past Ludum Dare event and I’ve wanted to do fun things with image data ever since I saw Andy Schatz talk about his image based level serialization technique for Monaco at GDC 2011, and these types of games are great for entertainment, although you can also find other type of games such as casino games like pokie mate and others which are really fun and you can make money as well.
I am pretty sure my coworkers have had enough of me talking about roguelikes. Something about the ever changing gameplay keeps me interested a lot longer than most other games I play. For those of you who have played a roguelike, you know what I’m talking about. As for the rest, let me run you through how a roguelike works.
A roguelike, named after the first game of the genre called Rogue, is a dungeon crawler. However, the catch is that everytime you play the game, the dungeon is randomly generated making each game a new experience. And unlike other games, roguelikes are meant to be started over many times: the games are made to be difficult and the player character peremently dies upon death.
To be honest, this description makes roguelikes sound like a frustrating electronic hell. High difficulty and a lack of save points seems to go against a lot of the design principles we hold dear today. But roguelikes carry something that other games do not. Don’t believe me? Go play spelunky, its free. I’ll see you back here in a couple days.
As we mentioned a couple weeks ago we had planned our first Adventure Club Games Game Jam but unfortunately do to an illness we had to reschedule. We have now picked a day and we are now going to jam from Monday Aug 27 12:30pm to Wednesday Aug 29 12:30pm.
As we mentioned in our first post we are still looking for themes so feel free to post more theme ideas in the comments below, through Twitter or Facebook. Our current list of themes can be found here.
Adventure Club Games had the great pleasure of running several of the MSU media summer camps this year, one of which was a week long camp dedicated to 3D art and animation. The Goal of the camp was to introduce students to Maya and show them an entire character pipeline from modeling to animating. This of course brought us to the world of rigging, often frightening and confusing to the novice 3d artist. In the interest of allowing the students to move through this material at their own pace, I wrote up this comprehensive step by step guide on developing a solid rig for bipedal characters. Continue reading
Happy Monday Everybody! As our previous blog post stated we were going to start a Game Jam today but due to an illness we are going to have to postpone. We still plan on having the jam and we will put up another post once we have picked a new date. As far as the themes go, we want to give a big thank you to everyone that submitted themes and we still plan on using them once we reschedule. And if you get the chance, be sure to tell Shawn(@qtbon) that you hope he gets better soon :-).
Next week Monday through Wednesday, Adventure Club Games is holding an internal game jam and we need your help!
The goal of a game jam is to make a game from the ground up in a limited amount of time. And traditionally, to encourage brainstorming, a theme is chosen in the beginning. The theme can be taken any way the developers want be it literal or abstract. And that’s where you come in.
We need themes! And we want you to think of them!
Places, events, objects, colors, moods. Anything that could inspire and offer a basis for an interesting game. Anything from frying pans to confusion to the color orange. Give us any and all ideas. Just please, nothing obscene
So brainstorm and tweet, facebook, or comment below your themes for our game jam. We will release the final list by Monday. On Monday, we will announce the theme. Check in regularly to see how the game is coming along.
Thanks in Advance
Adventure Club Games
P.S. We aren’t doing these so don’t even say them because I know you were going to: