The “Bivouac Urbain”: five months later

{ January 5, 2010 @ 11:36 am } · { Uncategorized }

Ok, I know, I’m a terrible blogger. Remember when I said that I was accepted in a game design certificate? Well, it’s awesome, but I have no life because of it. Anyways, now I have a little time (lucky me!) and I want to make a retrospective of my experience at the local game jam I did last summer with three other students. Better late than never… and now I’m nostalgic, so I guess it’s a good time to write about it.

First, I am proud to announce that we won the first place in student category. But what matters the most was not the end, but the journey.

We were four students who never worked together before and we had really little skills of making games. We were in an alien city, with people we met for the first time and we had no idea of how it would be. We had poor equipment compared to other teams (one of us worked on a net book!) and I was the only artist of our team (I’m no artist; I’m a game designer…). My teammates were studying in software engineering, but they had barely touched to the engine we used for the contest (XNA) and it was a first game making experience for two of them. We had really little hope to win a prize, but we knew we would win experience and it was the only thing important to us.

What I can say? It was one of the most intense and wonderful experience of my life. First, the event was perfectly organized so we had all we needed (except warm, but hey! It was an extreme survival game development contest in a tent! The temperature was part of the experience). The managers and volunteers made a masterful job to help us all the way through and I thank them a million times for that. We slept maybe seven hours in three days, but it totally worth it.

Now, let’s write some words on the creation process of our prototype. First, the brainstorming was a really good learning process. As a designer, I knew some techniques to bring ideas together, but we only use them at first. Then, we try to isolate ourselves of all the noises made by the other teams and we went to a coffee shop to brainstorm. After maybe half-an-hour of discussion, we got an “aha moment”. We knew we had found our idea and all team members agreed to make something great out of it.

We prototyped our idea early and we didn’t sleep that night. The guys made a rough model of our level, with boxes instead of platforms and a picture of MacGyver as our main character. While they were working on implementing the mechanics, I made all the content, graphics, texts and sounds. We worked from Friday night to Saturday night, barely sleeping in the process (I think I slept half-an-hour). Then we took a break and we slept 6 hours to be top shape Sunday morning to finish our job. Fortunately, we finished Enter the Sponge Factory on time (5 minutes before the end). We present the product to the judges and we knew we made a great job, even if our game didn’t look as good as the ones of our competitors.

One member of our team had to return early to Montreal. Another one could stay until the party where the judges would announce the winners. I and Francis, my last teammate, were supposed to leave before the party. We went to the bus station. Just before the bus gates, we took the decision to go to the party anyway and to take the first bus next morning instead. We didn’t regret that choice at all!

We had a great weekend. We learned a lot about teamwork and crunch time and the result was pretty satisfactory. We were already in a good mood when we joined the other participants to a small lounge bar. We didn’t even care if we would win or not. Well, the cherry on the cake was when they announced our game as the winner of the student category. I totally jump in the air. It was a blast! We took a “drink of victory” (whatever it was) and we celebrate until we were too tired to stand.

The entire weekend was a damned fairy tale. It could not get more over my expectations. I will certainly remember it as “the good old time” in a few years. I am really proud that I had the chance to be there. It was certainly one of the happiest moments of my life and it’s why I share it with you today!

No doubt that I’ll be there next year.

Advertisement