Hello, I’m Kellee Santiago from thatgamecompany, creators of flOw, and currently in development on Flower. The fine people at Playstation.Blog are good enough to allow me to use my first post here to let you all in on a little thing we have going on here at thatgamecompany call the 24hr Game Jam.
Championed by our lead engineer John Edwards, the 24hr Game Jam was created as a way for us to do something quick, dirty, and fun … and maybe let out a little steam in the process. The goal is always to make a game, from start to finish, on the PS3 in 24hrs. We go from 10am Saturday to 10am Sunday, and then whatever we have, we lock it up. Future Game Jams might have more specific goals, but for this first one, we just wanted to see how much fun we could make in a day. Oh, and our game designer Nick Clark wanted something that was multiplayer that we could enjoy in the office.
So welcome … to Game Jam 0: Gravediggers
Goals:
- To see how much fun we could generate in 24 hours.
- To make something multiplayer we could play in the office.
Premise/Rules:
You are a gravedigger. There can be up to 6 gravediggers competing against one another locally. You move with an analog stick, jump with the “X” button, and shoot with Right Bumper. Oh yeah, you are a gravedigger with a pistol.
You are killing zombies. There are lots of them. More specifically you are collecting zombie heads. When you kill a zombie, their head pops off and you can collect them.
In order to get a point for your head, you must deposit heads into a crypt. There are two crypts on the level, but they can move around in the middle of a game.
You can shoot other players, and collect their heads. Their heads are worth more. In addition, you will be able to collect all of the zombie heads they have gathered so far.
If you are shot by another player or a zombie chomps you to death, your head will pop off and you will become a zombie. (“Rise from your grave….”) You can still chomp other players, but you can’t deposit heads, and you will remain a zombie until you find your head. If another player deposits your head in a crypt, it will pop up somewhere else on the level.
The ground is very soft. If it’s in your way, I suggest shooting a path through it. It’s a lot more fun. Every level is randomly generated.
Along the way, you might pick up special weapons:
- Uzi (fast pistol)
- mines (explode on impact)
- satchel charges (detonated on command)
- the uber-weapon, the shotgun.
If you pick one up, it will automatically become your new default weapon.
The first player to deposit 50 heads wins. Below is a play-through with five players.
And there you have it! The product of 24hrs straight work on the PS3. I’m not sure if it plays well on video, but I gotta tell you the game is large amounts of ridiculous fun for us to play. Maybe you have to be there. At any rate, I’m looking forward to reporting back from our next Game Jam, and I hope you all got a kick out of this one!
Would you ever just release it as a source code, but edited of course of all illegal files to have and whatnot for compiling on a Mac OS X/Windows system? Maybe as free/shareware?
I like seeing stuff like this, perhaps in the future, someone will design a low end dev studio to the consumers to make content that they can make real PSN $$$ by selling to other users? that would just totally take the cake for a creative individual such as myself.
Your Zombie game reminds me of the old days, me and my buddies tinkering around with Turbo Pascal, and modding the old D&D games to be co-operatively played over a network.
Keep up the great work, and if you hear of any creative positions for storyline/game planners, consider fans/consumers such as myself for the job. We (the consumers) are the pool in which the video game industry not only obtains it’s best customers, but also recruits some of it’s greatest game creators.
not bad at all =)
Heh, that’s fantastic :) I love those types of challenges, be it game making, artwork, short film in a day, etc… it’s cool seeing how creative you can be in such a short time.
The PS3 really needs something like AMOS (good old days of the Amiga) or some form of simple game creation software.. just to let the hobby developers create stuff and have a community site to share their work.
Shame we wont be able to play your zombie game, but thanks so much for sharing the vid with us :)
+1 on the sinistar voice, and sure, release it cheap, support 4p multiplayer locally, and you’ve got a definite buy.
Definitely *don’t* improve the graphics.
It would be great if Sony let us gamers make our own games and sell them on the PlayStation store. Give us the tools to make our own games, teach us how to make games (haha, I know), charge us a fee for selling our games on the PlayStation store, and we’ll all be riche…err, I mean, happy.
This one looks like it was inspired from SOLDAT!
Which was one of the most amazing simplistic online title ever!
Did you guys play it before making this?
This game looks freakin fun! I wanna play!
ha ha, add it as an extra in flower, you know, just a silly little option to play, like in , gosh, that racing game on the tip of my tounge, you know how they have that pixel racing/pacman game thing they have? do it something like that
SO….come out with it….this whole console needs to take itself outta this daydream mode.
Im getting really tired of all this look but OH NO dont touch GARBAGE talk. Just dont make more empty promises PLEASE.
wow, this is amazing! if you make it only a dollar, everyone will buy it!
Just adding to the loads of petitions for making it available. Thanks in advance!
What ever happened to that “tank” game using the Eye in which you can register your custom item and have it be displayed as your tank and then do battle with the object? It’d be really cool if Sony released software so the public can make their own games and put them up on the PS Store. I hope you guys plan on releasing these neat games you show off instead of just saying, “We can do this and that, but you’re not touching it.”
Sometimes it’s the simple games that are the most fun!
Interesting! At least it isn’t an interactive screensaver and the title doesn’t have annoying capitalization.
But it looks like a simple homemade flash game that I can play for free on Newsgrounds.com but with crappier graphics and annoying sound effects?
It’s cool though. It beats flow any day of the week.
Hah, thanks!