April DINO Jam

by Darren Torpey on April 29th, 2010

April 2010 DINO Jam was held on April 24th and 25th at DINO Interactive Studios and hosted by Emily Daniels and Darren Torpey.

[whats_a_jam]

The Games!

Here are some of the games we made at the jam:

Camera Solitaire Pong

The game

The team

Tools used

Premise

My main goal for the weekend was to try out the openFrameworks C++ toolkit, a multimedia framework of which I had seen a presentation about it a week before. The feature set looked nice, and it was reported to be very easy to use. It had a lot of computer vision features built in, which seemed interesting and was something I hadn’t worked with before. I decided to try my hand at writing a pong app using the camera on my laptop. “Camera Solitaire Pong” is the result.

More info on the game is available on Dave Ludwig’s blog here

Cthulhu Loves You

The game

The team

Tools used

Premise

This 8-bit-style shootem up game was made from theAkihabara HTML5 game engine. In this game you are Björk coming to rescue Iceland from Cthulhu and the terrors of Eyjafjallajökull. The dialogue is made of real quotations from Björk to make it more true to form and the game took 12 hours to make from start to finish.

The Z key is the A button and to shoot and you move with the arrow keys. Can YOU help Björk defeat Cthulhu?

LineBloom

The team

Tools used

Premise

LineBloom is a simple line drawing physics game for iPad, built with Unity. The art and controls convey both a sense of tranquility and urgency, with a timer counting your progress of blooming flowers in an open arena.

I chose to build in Unity and deploy to iPad as I wanted to gain experience with the new device in preparation for future work. I chose Unity due to the fact that I arrived 6 hours late to the jam and wanted to complete a project in the time allotted. With previous knowledge of Unity, I was able to start implementing right away.

Forest Frenzy

The game

The team

Tools used

Premise

In Forest Frenzy, you’re trying to collect enough “life energy” from the bottom of the screen to grow the plants at the top of the screen, which in turn prevent the ghosts from consuming each other. The game was meant to be about balancing a natural ecosystem.

I made Forest Frenzy because I wanted to learn how to use the newly released Akihabara engine, which allows for pure-HTML5 games, written in Javascript, a language I use a lot for other projects. I decided to modify Akihabara’s PacMan-clone demo game, as it had the most documentation and I wanted to make a strongly tile-based game, anyway.

Reinventing “Stuff on Toast”

Vickie Wu decided to just completely spoil us with delicious food made on the spot. Here are some of the items she made (click on each image to read about the project):

Other games made:

  • “This Island is Cursed” by James DeMond
  • “Experimental Interactive Fiction Game Set on a Beach” (my name) by Amanda Cosmos