Cratesmith

Friday through sunday was the brisbane 48 hour game making challenge. An annual, frightfully competitive game jam/competition I’ve attended these last two years. And we won!

In the challenge, teams of up to six people are given 48 hours to make a game about 3 words. This year it was “dinosaur”, “revenge” and “bar”.

So what did we do? We made a western, starring a dinosaur who’s brother had been lynched by sheep (who say “baa” …geddit?) … in a bar! Behold!

You can even play the game here: Big Al’s Redemption

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Download an offline, higher res version: Windows, Mac

This time I was with the fine team Cratewerks (yes I suggested the name) ; Brendan Watts, Chris Vera, Matt Ditton, Mike Sharpe, Craig Bentick and Myself.

We spent a few hours debating how we should interpret the words at first, discussing the idea of having a game about geriatrics, adaptions of classic revenge stories (hamlet, the count of monte christo), legal drama for the word bar … but feeling nothing from any of those ideas we decided to walk a dinosaur into a bar with a minigun to get some revenge.

For Brendan & Myself, it was a grueling slog of finishing feature after feature. We had the game playable by the end of the first night and as soon as you were almost about to finish something, someone would say… “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if there were ninja sheep”, and half an hour later, there would be ninja sheep. Matt (bless his soul) had it worse, the animation system & asset exporting from Maya was not behaving itself and for most of the 48 hours he was fixing assets, tweaking things and fighting fires with unlinked assets. Sadly, Mike & Craig were very unwell and couldn’t last out the full 48hrs. Fortunatley Chris was able to forgo sleep and sanity in order to produce… well, every piece of art in the final game. It’s downright scary how fast he works!

I’m exhausted.