Comments on: Team Building (Mini Game Week) Nice write up Justin, I had almost forgotten minigame week :) For those interested here's a (very bad) youtube of some of the results: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwt9y5ebiMs It was definitely a good use of the week but is interesting reading how your team approached it, we approached it from a different way, and for a sort of 'completeness' I'll quickly describe it here. - Within the first hour we had a group meeting and the programmers told the designers and artists what they could do/work with, this basically amounted to:- - 'No 3d, 2d only but we can do isometric if you want' - No scrolling levels, single screen only, so they can focus on the gameplay rather than 'big worlds'. - If there is any real risks associated with something then it's cut. Where 'real' equals the possibility of several hours getting wasted. - The game should have simple fundamental rules that make it fun, and then ideally have building blocks on top of that which expand the game, but can also be cut if time runs out with no adverse affects. - We didn't evaluate any software of hardware really, we had a quick discussion and knew we had to be able to get things running quickly so just chose one and blasted forwards. We ended up doing 'Roblocks' a single screen isometric 'Robo Rally' style game. The basic rules were set out on the first day, and then came up with new 'blocks' such as pits, bombs etc as the week progressed. But the game didn't require those additional blocks, so when we ran out of time we just 'shipped' with what we had, without any features noticeably missing a the core gameplay was there from the beginning and remained intact through development. We developed on the 360 in C++, and the entire game was built around the graphics sample that draws a shaded 2d triangle on the screen (tutorial1 if I remember correctly). We had 4 player support with sounds, music, animation etc. The 2d nature of our game allowed us easily to hack in drop shadows, and things that looked really complex but weren't (all the little robots looked great with specular highlights....which were all baked in in Maya). We had awesome artists and animators and a great sound guy as well which made our game awesome. Sprite animations were done in Maya, then exported as individual greyscale sprites which we tinted to various team colours at runtime. The only thing we had to deal with which was unexpected was that we had quite massive load times and memory issues as we had thousands of frames of sprite animations. We solved these by putting in a loading screen :), and by replacing unique sprite colours with greyscale ones and tinting them in the shader. But that kept me busy for a few hours.. I think we were finished by Thursday afternoon without any of us putting any extra hours in. umm i think that's it, was really a mind dump there. Oh and we won best game and best graphics for the week, which isn't bad for a 2d game relying basically on a 'DrawSprite' call :) Nice write up Justin, I had almost forgotten minigame week :)

For those interested here’s a (very bad) youtube of some of the results: [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mike Acton, seanparsons and Jeff Thompson, Justin Liew. Justin Liew said: Mini Game Week Reminiscing: