Some days ago I returned from Game Development Camp 2005 which was a really great experience. 48 of the best young game developers from mainkly Denmark but also Sweden and Norway were selected out of more than 100 applicants.
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When I arrived Sunday things started out not quite as we expected. They had warned us that we should not meet up in our finest cloth, but most of us did not really think much of that since it was a game development camp. It turned out that we had to start the week on a military training area!
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First we had to run through the training curse as seen on the image above. After that we played CTF which was quite fun despite the lack of rocket launchers and power ups:)
Shortly after arriving at Aalborg University we got dinner which of course consisted of Pizza. There were of course also plenty of Coca Cola because they were sponsors:D
In the evening we were presented for 4 game ideas(fps, speedway, fighting and flight). We then had to form 2 groups with 6 person for each game idea. I chosed to develop a flight game because I love the old flight games like Raptor. When the groups were formed each got its own office.
The next day we started the game development. The development tool was Virtools which was new to all of us. This program actually tries to implement some kind of visual programming using building blocks!
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It turned out that we had a group consisting only of programmers. Since we needed to have some graphic artists I was assigned to do 2d and 3d work together with one of the others. I had never worked with 3d studio max before, so there were indeed some things to learn there:)
In the evening there were a social event cosisting of a CS tournament. Our group scored 3rd despite that most of us not had played CS for years:D
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The next couple of days we developed an entire game. Thursday was really tough because we had to cut most of the features and because of the merging. Merging additions to one Virtools project into another usually takes just as long time as it initially did to program the features. This resulted in that we had to cut a lot of features and even features which we were basicly done with:/
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Just as the other days we worked all night in order to get the game ready for friday morning. To keep us awake we had the good supply of cola and energy drinks. The last day even those things were not enough and we had to proceed on to instant coffee fixes! You simply take a spoon of instant coffee and swallow it together with a lot of cola, this is really something that works:)
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Thankfully almost all groups got a decent game ready an hour before deadline. The finished games was now shown to the leader of the camp and a producer from IO Interactive. At lunch the 4 nominated games were announced and that was really great because our game HideAway Hawaii was among those:)
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A few hours later each nominated group had to present their game to the judges and the rest of the game developers. The judges were a pro-headmaster from Aalborg Uni, a development chief from TDC(Denmarks biggest tele communication firm), vice director in IBM Denmark, the producer from IO and a few other guys.
The first place went to a fighting game called Süper Slåsch Brothers III, the second place to Space Ranger Bjarke and the third place to our game HideAway Hawaii:) We won a copy of 3d studio max student version, so I am going to learn some modelling.
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A diary in danish along with some pictures can be found here:
The games can be found here:
