bivouac urbain

game jamming inside the main tent. taken with my DSi

A few weeks ago I was in Quebec City for Bivouac Urbain, a game jam/game prototyping competition. I'm not too proud of my entry but the event was extremely awesome and resulted in some interesting games. My favourite entry of the ones I played was messhof's Jetpack Basketball, which I highly recommend if you have someone to play against. Also worth checking out is Stimergy, by Renaud Bédard (Polytron) and Heather Kelley (Kokoromi), a game about guiding ants using pheromone trails. Click the link for Renaud's post about it which includes a postmortem and a time-lapse video of the development of the game.

My simple and not very original entry was Spirit. The theme of the competition was "antithesis" which was pretty vague and prompted me to do some research. I found that a particular line from a poem by John Dryden came up repeatedly as an example of antithesis as a rhetorical device, so I based my game on it. I coded it within close to 24 hours, since I didn't get any work done the first night. It probably would have gone better for me if I'd been more prepared, with a framework in place and maybe some idea of what kind of game I wanted to make. Overall it was a good experience and I'm looking forward to my next game jam.