Last week a little competition started at my school known as the Game Bowl.  This Game Bowl was created to have the students that wish to participate, to put their skills to the test in multiple teams to see which team can create the best game in 10 days. Each team and can be put together by students that wish to work together as their own team, or of students that are chosen by teachers via a draft.  When I mention teachers, their involvement with the game bowl is fairly similar to the students.  The difference is that they have more experience and are there to, in a sense, chaperon the teams they drafted in order to make sure the event goes smoothly and according to schedule. Of course, it doesn't hurt that their involvement in making the game is a great deal of help. To throw in mix into the whole event, there are "3 main ingredients" that need to be implemented into each team's game. This year the 3 ingredients were 80's boom box, Rainbow, and an audio clip that says, "say hello to my little friend!".  Of course, a big rule is no copy write material is allowed in the game, so things have to be different enough to be out of reach of that law. (The audio clip, my team feels, if pushing that boundary so we are making a variation.)

In this year's Game Bowl, I am participating. It is my first Game Bowl simply because I am a new student to this school.  My skills are very limited, but they encourage new students to try and get involved. It is great in helping them learn the process and, more importantly, learn how to execute the process. I have learned a lot participating in this event and feel that it is a great experience.  There are only 2 days left until game launch (Saturday, 24th).

My part on my team, due to my limited skill set, is the game art that will be implemented into the game. Now that there are only 2 days left, I have finished all of my artwork. I am just a spectator waiting to see how the rest of my team pulls it together. The pieces of art that I drew for the game were the character main character, enemies, interacting objects, and backgrounds (5 layers). Upon completion, I scanned and emailed the work to the photoshop artist as well as the game programmer. The photoshop artist is almost done filling in all the colors and touches for the final look of the game. The photoshop artist then sent it to the animator to help the final art concepts move. The programmer used these unedited sketches to build the a perspective of the level layout and feel of the game. He also used them to help him see how to put in each element of the game like scaling for all visuals, placements, and movements. Later he will just simply replace the sketches with the real thing. Overall, I just can't wait for it to be done, other than those three jobs I mentioned, there are a few more aspects that other team members are working on. I hope to see those work out as well.

The winners of the Game Bowl mainly get bragging rights, but this year I feel like it will be a much better prize.  My reason is that, interestingly enough, Game Informer Magazine (GI) is going to be covering this event Saturday. So I'm getting the winners will perhaps get a little photo put in GI's magazine. We'll see if my team wins!

The biggest lesson I learn from this event is that it shows how much effort really goes into a game. It definitely involves are great amount of time and effort. That is, if you wish to create a well made game.  All of the students involved don't expect perfect games because of this 10 day time limit, but it will definitely get a great conclusion to the Game Bowl to see what we all came up with.

Once again, I am very excited to see the final product of everything. These games will be posted online for anyone to play. I will let everyone know what this site will be named following a link of how to get there. If you feel that these games suck just remember, it was only a 10 day project with, in some cases, strangers to make these games. But once you play them, I do hope you enjoy them.

Feel free to ask me any questions about the event itself, the school, or a post-mortem of what my team went through to make the game. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it and are excited just as much as I am for the finale!

That sounds extremely interesting!

I haven't done anything of the sort recently, but I understand why you are pumped about it.

Haha, yeah. The event didn't turn out how I imagined it. (does anything haha) but it was a good experience. The games will be voted on tomorrow (Monday, 26th)  We'll see. My team pissed me off because we had a few bugs to work out and they all (5 of them) decided to play the card game Magic against each other instead. I would have got it done right if I knew what to do but I couldn't because I'm new to the whole thing. So I left. Haha. It's whatever.

*UPDATE*

Games were turned in last Saturday, a lot of them turned out pretty bad, including mine. I did the artwork and my team just destroyed it because they decided not to finish it. Kinda makes me mad. I worked hard on getting them drawings to work with and they just decided to play Magic the card game. The programmer pixelated all the artwork in the game and some of the artwork to be edited was imported in the wrong format. Eh, lets just put into account that we had to do it ten days so whatever. There are good ones though, like....2, ha. You'll know the best one when you see it though. Hope you enjoy checkin' out these games.

The site is:

flash.games.local

My game is named "MasterBlaster".