#hitsplayjam
(presentation of the event: http://playtime.blog.lemonde.fr/hits-playtime-3-continue/ (french))
This event is actually part of a bigger one, the Hit Playtime, that lasts for a month if I am not mistaking, and in which I wasn't part (but very interesting games were produced that you should check out!)
I was participating in this event together with a wonderful dreamteam: my friends Bobo (@Bobo_oh) and Mouf (@SuperMouf) and my love Glennie (@ORPH4NUS).
I was participating in this event together with a wonderful dreamteam: my friends Bobo (@Bobo_oh) and Mouf (@SuperMouf) and my love Glennie (@ORPH4NUS).
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| Great event, great people... great everything |
It was overall hilarious and went extremely well. But let me tell that story from the beginning... *grin*
I don't have many pictures yet, and I hope I will have some more in the coming days to fill this article with the same joy that we had at the actual event!
The event was dematerialized, which means we could work on it anywhere we wanted (and also that it was completely free). We chose to set up our base camp at the NEF, a paper RPG event that was taking place at the same time in my school (http://la-nef.net/ (french))
As you can guess, the atmosphere was very festive, and the place full of more or less weird people, all of them being absolutely nice.
There was also a video game room, and somebody even surprised me with the Starcraft 2 board game -that looks absolutely terrific but sadly I had no time for it...
Each team needed to produce content to feed the WIP page on Le Monde's website and their tweet feed where we could discuss quite easily with other jammers. Each team also needed a logo: our team, the great Salmons&&Robots had a pixellated mechanical salmon I drew, but this is an other story (which is told here)
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| That one, remember? |
Then we got the theme. It is this video, that I encourage you to watch: http://youtu.be/BPQChOLC3c8
We personally all felt dizzy after looking at just a few minutes... No need to tell you how hard it felt in the beginning to get started... But at least it wasn't like in these game jams where the theme is so open that you have too many ideas you can't choose between. Afterwards, I'd definitely say that this has been very interesting and reflective.
Furthermore this video turns out to be a major brick in the progress of special effects, as well as inspiring a lot of people. The director, Zbigniew Rybczyński eventually won an Oscar for it.
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| Guys, I think I grasp something here! |
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| "We're beta-testin' yo!" -with an anonymous tester |
My favorite things
- The theme was terribly harsh, but the game concepts that we took out of it are really interesting and original. It was also awesome to be able to put salmons and robots in there x)
- Saturday night went we were already kinda tired and Boris started to play electronic accordion on his sythe and we couldn't stop laughing. He was so close from being a travelling entertainer...
- Totally not related, but that dragon plush that the people from the bar were carrying around on their shoulder was so cool!
- Although it would maybe be even nicer with an additional IRC chat in this situation, the well organized twitter feed that allowed us to stay tuned with what the others were producing was very neat. We never felt like we were on our own, it's like the whole community was bragging in our browser all along :P
*** CONCLUSION ***
For more information about The Salmon Factory, the 2-players tablet game that we are currently finishing up, please stay tuned with twitter, or our Pinterest board that you can find here: http://pinterest.com/adelievanneste/the-salmon-factory/
I will also be publishing a separate article about that game, our game design process, and my first experience as an artist!