Game Development – 48 hours of powah
If you had 48 hours and a team, what kind of game would you make? Game Jam aims to find out. The teams are given some contraints around which they must build a game in the space of two days. NYU alumni that I am, I can go to the NYU branch of the Game Jam. This is the first Game Jam ever hosted, which is a bit lame, since I’d like to see some previous winners. But there aren’t any, so oh well. We’re going to be working in XNA, which is Microsoft’s genius game-development language. I call it genius, because it brings independent game development to the Xbox 360. Any developer can run his or her games right on his or her Halo machine! It’s created a huge, wide-open canvas for aspiring console gamedevs. I’m… not sure if anything has arisen from this, but it’s a great idea, certainly worthy of a hat-tipping. I hope the constraints are actually game-interesting, maybe something like “The player must control two entities”, and not something like “isometric camera”. 48 hours seems like a short time, and it is. John Romero had, like, a million years to make Daikatana, and it turned out… bad. We do not have a million years, but we can avoid making Daikatana, God willing. Wish us luck.