My friends from Bombing Brain Interactive are attending 360iDev in Austin this week. I received a call from them last night, asking if I wanted to help them submit an app to Game Jam, a coding challenge event. You can read more about it here, but the basic idea is that you are given thirteen hours and a theme, and you have to code something resembling a functioning game in that short time period. Pretty hard to do well, and you’d never want to submit an app to the app store after only 13 hours of work, but the idea is to get your brain flowing, practice being efficient, working under pressure, etc. And at the end of the day, you may end up with at least a prototype from which you can build.
The theme this time was “Change the World.” Pretty vague, but I guess that’s the point. Open the mind to the possibilities, so you don’t end up with ten versions of the same game from different developers.
We tend to target preschoolers with Bombing Brain games, so the guys thought it would be fun to play on the theme literally. Take a globe with eyeballs, arms, and legs, and put different outfits on it. Simple enough, and full of opportunities to have some fun.
I went to work right away on a globe character. I was careful not to make any of the continents accurate in any way. (Didn’t want to offend anyone in other countries by suggesting the “world” only included the US.) I also wanted to make the planet somewhat gender-neutral, so that we could easily put girl or boy outfits on it. After an hour or so, I ended up with this:
Somewhat rough, but I had to move on. I made a quick “space” background with some gradients, a scatter brush, and the good old “difference clouds” render filter. I was surprised how quickly I was able to make a cartoony but convincing—though admittedly entirely inaccurate—night sky view. (My apologies to the astronomers out there.) Next came the outfits. Putting clothes on a giant ball isn’t exactly easy. Pants and hats are simple enough, but once I tried to make a princess outfit, I immediately ran into trouble. Hard to make a dress for a character with no neckline. After several more hours I had nine outfits: Cowboy, Princess, Nerd, Pirate, Groucho Marx, Librarian, Baby, Surfer, and my favorite, an Elvis Impersonator. Meanwhile, Tim and Gene were hard at work coding this thing up. Gene was also arranging some quick impromptu music via Garageband samples and his MacBook Pro’s built-in microphone for vocals. (I’m sure the neighbors in his hotel were completely confused.)I went to bed after the guys dismissed me around midnight my time. When I woke up for work a few hours later, they had a working prototype waiting in my Dropbox for me. It was absolutely amazing how well the three of us managed the project with the bare minimum of meetings, schedules, project management, etc. We work well together, and we trust each other’s instincts. There was actually very little communication beyond a short chain of emails, (thanks to their crappy hotel WiFi connection). Thirteen hours of time, 1,200 miles between us, nothing but a few laptops, an iMac, and Dropbox.
And people wonder why I get excited about the booming mobile software market. Where else can you pull something like this off and have this much fun doing it?
