Mar
12
2012
By Alex W
Earlier this year at Guelph Game Jam 2, I decided to go analog and build a card game with real, physical cards. After the 8 hour jam, I ended up with a quick little game called Monster Mages, heavily inspired by aspects of Dominion and Magic: The Gathering.
Jan
24
2012
By Alex W
Join Kwartzlab on Saturday, January 28 between 12:00 PM and 12:00 AM for our third annual Winter-een-mas Celebration!
Winter-een-mas is a holiday for gamers, spanning from January 25th through the 31st, and celebrated by spending time playing games with friends and family. We hope you’ll join us for this free event – featuring twelve hours of gaming goodness – playing classics from Settlers of Catan to Halo.
Feb
28
2011
The beginning of Day 9 marked a change in our goal planning. Up until the end of Day 8, our development was still targeting the path laid out in our original design doc on Day 0. While we knew after about Day 5 that we weren’t going to meet all our goals, it wasn’t really until Day 9 that we stopped and talked about our revised target. Considering what we had (and more importantly, what we didn’t have), we changed the core of our game to better suit our development timeframe. Instead of “evolving a powerful dungeon-crawling character”, our game was going to be about “destroying as many enemies as possible before dying”.
With that key change in mind, we set out our goals for Day 9:
Feb
27
2011
We’ve wrapped up our penultimate day on this project. However, there isn’t much time for reflection – in order to have something fun and playable for the final day, we need to push hard on Day 9. The goals for Day 8:
Feb
26
2011
I’ve been feeling the effects of my early design decisions over the past few days. With this being the most involved game engine I’ve written, I’ve definitely suffered from the lack of experience, meaning most of Day 6 and 7 needed to be spent correcting those problems. This means that on the 3D side, a bunch of the requirement that we’ve needed to implement are far overdue, and are hurting our chances of meeting the Sunday deadline. The goals for Day 7 were:
Feb
25
2011
Role-playing Games (RPGs) are all about the numbers. Quantifying attributes, calculating armor values, computing damage after mitigation; It’s a thing of beauty for data geeks. Up until Day 6, we had enough on our plate to worry about just getting the world to work without thinking about the calculations and equations that are integral to it. But, finally, it’s time to bust out the Excel spreadsheets, power up the calculators and do some math. The goals:
Feb
24
2011
Day 5 marks the midpoint of our development cycle, coincidentally falling on a Wednesday. I think we’ve come a long way in just the first half of the project – the trick will be continuing that pace of development over the second half. Day 5′s goals were a bit more modest compared to previous days. On the OpenGL side, I’m getting to a point where most of the development I’m doing is the kind of work I’ve never done before with this tech, so progress feels like it’s slowing down.
Feb
23
2011
After 3 days of solid development time, Day 4 called for a bit of clean up in the 3D engine code. It was work that needed to be done, but unfortunately not the kind of material that makes for a good blog post. The goals for the day were more nebulous, and performance a bit harder to measure.
Feb
22
2011
By Alex W
Day 3 continued the trend of setting goals that were just slightly out of reach. They say you’re not supposed to set unreachable goals, but it feels like, given the time crunch we’re in, making these tight schedules keeps us working as hard as possible. The goals for Day 3:
Feb
21
2011
By Alex W
Day 2 began around noon at Kwartzlab, on the second day of the Global Synchronous Hackathon. We were feeling ambitious, and laid out another 3 goals for the day:
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