No Sleep 'til Pac-Man

What does it take to win an all-night battle of the devs?
4/10/2009 3:36 PM | 4 Comments | Page 1 of 2

The scene isn't what you'd expect to find in a gleaming Silicon Valley office park: Exhausted, bleary-eyed game developers stuffed into a conference room, some in need of a shave, some in need of shower. The whiteboards on the walls are scrawled with drawings, jokes and programming language -- evidence of a sleepless night spent toiling. This is a game jam. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, it works like this: Teams of game makers (programmers, artists and designers) gather to create finished games in a nearly impossible amount of time, competing to see who can pull off the best work. It's like a battle of the bands, with less sex and more math.

In the case of the Wild Pockets Game Jam, held last weekend at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus, the contestants had 24 hours to do their thing. The final products are, if nothing else, a ringing endorsement for Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center program. Of the three winning teams, the top two consist of current and former ETC students.


What does it take to beat the competition in a battle of the nerds? "One word," says Daniel Bryner, "scope." Bryner is an ETC graduate and creator (along with two other team members) of the First Prize-winning Lava Ball, a game (unsurprisingly) about navigating a bouncing ball across some tricky platforms suspended above a fiery pit of lava. It sounds simple, but the game plays remarkably well, given the time constraints. And it's that simplicity that won the day, according to Bryner: "I think one of the most common mistakes game developers make (at any scale) is over-scoping a project. The reason we chose to make Lava Ball was because it was so simple, and it was something we felt we could realistically implement in 24 hours. At its core, it's just a ball bouncing on cubes."

It also helps to be a pro. Bryner and his teammates (Bradley Johnson and Chris Webb) are all employees of Crystal Dynamics, where they worked on Tomb Raider Underworld. This might explain how three guys managed to make not just one, but two games in 24 hours (they also made a physics-based puzzle game) and return to their hotel for a few hours of shut-eye.

If the first-place game is a demonstration of simple game design and experience winning the day, the second shows the power of ridiculous art. Save the Boy takes a few pages from the world of Katamari Damacy -- simple square figures and bright colors in the service of an absurd idea. Players throw random farm animals at a brick structure (think Boom Blox), causing said structure to collapse and thereby saving the titular boy perched atop (no word on how causing the boy to fall 40 feet into a pile of rubble saves him).


The team that created Save the Boy is a melting pot, with two members from Taiwan (Aaron Lo and Hua-Wei Sung), two from Korea (Soo Jeong Bae and Heegun Lee) and one from Chile (Ivan Ortega). They're all Carnegie Mellon ETC grads and live in the San Francisco Bay area. They, too, ascribe their success to simplicity, in a semi-demented way: "Throwing animals is a very simple activity," says Ortega. "We wanted something silly and very approachable that everyone could relate to. Throwing animals seemed like a perfect fit."