Hallow Games

West Virginia video game development

Game Jam

Lobsterbotomy – Ludum Dare 37 – WVU Game Developers Club

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Lobsterbotomy is a game entry that several members of the WVU Game Developers Club made for Ludum Dare 37 over the weekend of December 9-11, 2016.  The theme was “One Room”.  In the game, you play as a lobster in someone’s head, who is on a date.  You control that lobster who picks the dialogue options to continue on the date.  As you are playing, there are also other controls/parts of the body that you have to keep in check including butterflies from the stomach, frogs from your throat, and a beating heart, that beats faster when you are nervous.

We brainstormed the first night when the theme was announced and after talking for several hours through several ideas, when we were going through a favorite idea round of discussion, I came up with the idea of gamifying the Disney Pixar film “Inside Out”.  From there, it was turned into a game and we spent a good amount of time drawing out possible dialogue trees to see if we could even make it work.

Besides the initial idea, I helped out with determining some of the actions, and writing a bit of the dialogue.  Over the weekend I had several other things happening, so I would say this is the least that I put into a game jam but I think the rest of the team pulled together very well and were able to make an excellent game in such a short amount of time.

External Links:

Ludum Dare Entry Page

Online game on WVU Game Developers Itch.io

Chillenium 2016 – Quest to Find All

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A small group of four of us from the West Virginia University Game Developers Club were lucky enough to travel down to Texas A&M University to participate in the 2016 Chillenium Game Jam that occured September 23-25, 2016.

I thought about trying to summarize everything here, but I don’t think I would be able to describe everything as well as my teammate Ryan did in his post mortem linked below.  I personally contributed to the world design of the town, forest, and beach, along with several building interiors.  I also helped with some of the achievements in the game, including the Konami Code, Slenderman, and the fox, and I designed the main menu.

At the end of the event, we awarded a plaque for the university, which was exciting as it was the first award our club has ever gotten.   I really enjoyed the experience and I’m glad we were able to travel there and represent WVU as a team.

If you want to play the game, I suggest you download it because several of the achievements are currently broken in the web version of the game!

External Links:

Page on Hallow Games Site

Chillennium Post Mortem by Ryan Kubik

Game on WVU Game Developers Itch.io

Global Game Jam 2016 / Keeper’s Fate

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So one of the first thing’s that the advisor of our club, Dr. Frances Vanscoy, mentioned when we had our first few meetings was about the goal of eventually being a host site for the Global Game Jam.  I personally had not heard of the event and as soon as I figured out what it was, I really thought that would be a good goal for the club to be able to make our university one of the many host sites.  Up to this point, the nearest site was Pittsburgh (which also happens to be one of the biggest I believe).

I was elected President in May of 2015 and personally made it one of my goals to make this happen.  In October we became an official site and by early December, we were able to open up our registration.  With the help of the officers, we were able to get Dr. Jaime Banks, Professor Jeffrey Moser, and Dr. Nick Bowman to speak at our event in addition to our club advisor Dr. Vanscoy.  After they spoke, we played the Global Game Jam video keynotes and theme announcement, then immediately began brainstorming and spliting into teams.  By the time it was 10pm that Friday night, we had two teams formed and I had heard some exciting ideas related to the theme from both teams. (We also had Dr. Vanscoy making her own game as well).
I was not originally planning on participating in this Jam, but after I got home and was able to think about the theme and the opportunity to motivate myself to learn Gamemaker Studio (I got it for a good price when they had it in the humble bundle a few months prior), I had to at least attempt to make a game.  This game ended up being Keeper’s Fate, which is a top down 2D maze game.  I drew all the sprites myself (I’m sure you can tell, up to this point I had very little experience drawing sprites) and worked through several Gamemaker Studio tutorials to learn how to implement all the games features, menu functions, and artificial intelligence.  I will be the first to admit that my game is the least related to the theme at our site, but my goal was to learn the basic functions of Gamemaker Studio and I believe that I have succeeded at that.
By the end of the jam, we had four games submitted and from what everyone told me, it sounded like everyone enjoyed the entire event and said they would do it again next year!  I’m glad it was a success and I am looking forward to helping to organize it next year.  Now that we know the process of hosting a site,  I believe that we will be able to do a better job reaching out to the community next year, which will help us in getting more people to participate in the event.
Keeper’s Fate page on my site: http://hallowgames.com/keeper-s-fate.html

Giant Skies Unreal Epic Megajam October 2015

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This month I participated in my first Game Jam with other members of the WVU Game Developers club.  We called ourselves the Jovian Giants and made a game called Giant Skies.  The theme of the jam was “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”.  I think our game relates to the theme in the fact that it takes place on Jupiter, a gas giant, and your exploring the ruins of a Jovian civilization, which is the standing on the shoulders part.  The game is a 2D sidescroller that is very heavily story based.  I personally did some of the menu and level design for it.  I’m glad we had people on our team that could do all of the art and music since I don’t have much experience with either (I usually find free assets to use in my games).

The game was made in the Unreal game engine.  This was the first time I really used that engine, and it was a little frustrating because the game wouldn’t run on my computer at first.  I had to update my graphics card, so it runs now but I have had several occasion where my computer freezes and I have to do hard restarts to bring it back.  I’m still looking for a solution to that issue.

I think our team was very successful being that it was our first jam and I have heard from others that we were lucky to have a finished product.  It was good that the jam was a week long, which allowed for each of us to work on the game on our own schedules.  I doubt we won any awards but they announce those next week on the Unreal livestream.  All the submissions are featured in a montage they play on their livestream, which I think is really cool of them to do.  Below I have linked the page for the game on the club website and our original submission post we made on the unreal forum.

Game Links:

Game Page on WVU Game Developers Club Site

Link to Post on Unreal Epic Megajam Submissions Thread (#75)