Nordic Game Jam 2010 - Aftermath

I heard about it a long time ago, but never really thought that it would be interesting enough for me to go. Then Jesper Eiby and i was at a AANUG meeting about XNA a few months back, afterwards jesper was very determined about attending ngj 2010, and after few days he got me convinced that the world would end if we didn’t go.

I later found out he was probably lying, but as you may know, we did attend, and the world didn’t end, so maybe we really did save the world by attending nordic game jam 2010.

XNA

We had been playing around with XNA for quite a while before attending the XNA AANGU meeting in december, so we knew quite a lot of what was shown, but Jakob Lund Krarup is a wise man, so im glad we didn’t miss it :)

We had both decided to use our skills in XNA to make our chance of completing a game at the event bigger, as we would skip the whole learning curve involved in using another language or framework.

Our Team

The day before we left, we got in contact with Jakob, as we knew he was going too.
Then at the event we met up with him and his friend Lars Nysum, who is also a programmer, and we decided to create a team, so now our team consisted of 4 people, 3 xna developers and one programmer.
At the team creation thingy, we decided to split up and go see if we could find another member for our team, and we found a guy called “Rasmus”, he actually studies “Media Technology and Games” (at least i think thats the one) at the ITU, where the event was held.

Well, Rasmus knew alot about game design etc. etc, so he was a wonderful addition to our team. When looking for another member for our team, we were actually scouting for a sound kinda guy, but as it turns out Lars was extremely talented creating sounds, so he created an awesome background theme for the game, and Rasmus did some digging and found a bunch of cool sounds, which Lars then combined with the theme.

Our Ideas

As we expected, digging through our minds to find a cool idea for the game was hard, very hard. We spent all friday night and until 13 pm saturday brainstorming, we came up with the whole hunter-hunted-clone idea late friday evening, and Jakob begun development on a prototype and a hour later we had a working prototype.
But saturday we decided to spend an hor more braindstorming a new idea, we had doubts if the chasing dots idea would be too simple.

The new idea was actually not a bad idea, and the theme deception actually fitted quite well.
The base of the game would be a flat ground, with 1-5 factories / bussineses in the middle of the screen, the player would be viewing the “play-field” from the top, myabe a little angled.
The main objective of the game would then be to move cash between the businesses on the ground, so that the right amount of money would be in the business whenever a “tax-inspector” would visit the company.

Then investors would also be visiting, and to give them a good impression, alot of money had to be in the company he would visit, then he would invest money in the company. 
The speed investors and inspectors visit rate would gradually increase in speed, and the player would start with a low amount of cash.

It was actually a really good idea, and it would fit the theme really well. We were of course thinking about the economic situation in the world right now.

We actually considered if winning the game would be decided by the amount of money the executive director would have in a swiss bank account when flying to Mallorca.

That may sound really simple, but when brainstorming we had alot of small things pop up that would be time consuming, and last but not least, we had doubts if the gameplay would be catchy enough.

So that idea got scrapped.

Final Product

We ended up with a game called “Chasing Dots”.
In development we playtested the game and quickly we discovered that chosing that idea wasn’t a bad choise. We really had fun, and i think we may have spent a little too much time testing the game :)

”Chasing Dots” was chosen by one of the juryes (Tore from IO interactive), and quite frankly i don’t really know what that means, but i do know that we all got a diploma :)
Rasmus did a great job presenting the game after the rest of the us begun our journey to the cold north¨.

Here is a demonstration video of the game:

And here is a SilverSprite / SilverLight version of the game, which unfortunately doesn’t have any sound, and it is easily spotted that the game is not ment to run in silverlight.

Chasing Dots – Silverlight

or download from here
Jakob’s blog,

Im pretty sure il be attending the nordic game jam next year! :)