This weekend, despite being unable to attend QuakeCon in Dallas, Texas, ended up being a pretty great weekend. For the first time ever, I helped create a video game. I’ve always loved video games, and have long since wanted to make one. I decided to go to a “game jam” run by the good folks at Game CoLab called Phoenix Makes Games Jam, which for the uninitiated, is a timed challenge for people to create an entire video game. In this case, we had 48 hrs to make a dinosaur themed game.
The result of that endeavor was Dinosaur Story. A dinosaur survival and life simulator. Thanks to the hard work of our team (Team BINT), we were able to pull together a pretty impressive game in a very short amount of time. The best part of it all, is that we had fun doing it. We were probably the loudest group there, laughing and playing chiptunes the whole way through. Because of this great team, I was able to create inspired music which fit the theme of the game in addition to graphics assets which made up the title screen and some parts of the gameplay.
At the end of the day, our hard work was rewarded by winning first place in the competition in addition to winning a science award from ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination for our commitment to keeping the game (reasonably) scientifically accurate.
A huge thanks goes out to the team who made this happen…
Ian Robinson, the bad ass coder who gave us the tech and ability to make this game next level. This guy will definitely be going big places in the future.
Tyler Knecht, our capri wearing shadow coder, artist, and all around nice guy. Thanks to Tyler, we were able to put all of our hard work together into one cohesive piece.
Noti Peppas, our other bad ass coder who very quickly learned how to use tools he never used before (Unity) and created critical parts of the game including the UI and gameplay scripts.
All of these guys are awesome and talented. If you’re making a game and need some talented developers, I cannot think of anyone else to call who love video games and programming more than these cats.
Special thanks to Ben, Austin, and Alex at Game CoLab for making this happen. Also thanks to all the sponsors, and to the other teams for giving us such fierce competition.
Event Photos:
You can hear a short version of the music I composed and recorded for the game here:
Video of the title screen I made the graphics for and the team programmed:
A (very) short gameplay demonstration:
Expect complete version to be for sale on BandCamp before the end of the week.
All games from the Jam will be playable online shortly, expect links soon. In the meantime, check out the local press we received here, here, & here.
