So yesterday was awesome. The Jam itself is going pretty well. While
some of the folks who wrote the engine are really pessimistic (as in,
“This is going to be a total failure. Oh well”), most are in good
spirits and getting to know the engine, working on their designs.
Probably the highlight of my day was sitting in on a design session
with Randy and Chris, and not only being priviledged to watch them
work, but also actually getting to contribute to their design. (The
design in question is a game about high school girls where you are the
only girl in high school who can lie; your job is to use your
advantage to pit girls against other girls and climb the social
ladder.) I also got to sit in on Randy and Robin’s session, too, which
was about a game where you’re in the Fairmont lobby at GDC trying to
get famous game developers to dinner, but they’re constantly being
swarmed by admirers.
I am in awe of the artists. We have several professional
artists/modelers/animators here at the Jam, and oh man, to watch them
shape a box and a sphere into a human being or a couch or whatever is
just amazing. They work so fast. No offense to the coders, who are
brilliant, but even though I suck at coding, I personally can
comprehend what it is like to be a brilliant coder. But I can’t wrap
my brain around these guys to whom you can just say, “Give me a
Charlie Chaplin animation,” and they just build it for you.
It’s interesting to see where different people are right now. One guy
is building the game world first and tackling design later. Other
folks are just working out their design pretty fully and then getting
down to programming. Another one has no idea what game he wants to
make, and is just playing with the engine to see if any compelling
behaviors sort of magically manifest themselves from the natural
engine code.
And, courtesy of Darren’s camera which he so kindly lent me, here is
one of many pictures: Chris and Randy working on the truthful high school design
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