University of Bedfordshire GameJam 2014!

Last weekend (#dates) I attended a gamejam at the university. For those of you who don’t know what a gamejam is, it’s basically where a bunch of nerds get together and create games/apps. If that wasn't geeky enough, it’s a 48 hour constant hackathon. I've attended similar events at the university, but this one had a rather strange theme which was…

"We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”

This is a broad subject for a theme so it took quite a bit of planning to get the right theme and style game. My group members were:

Artists – Sean McGee, Robert McGreal and Chris Hadjimbeis

Programmers/Unity Developers – Kyle Field, Grant Wade, Tareq Ahmed and Daniel Nelson

Planning the game

We decided to create a horror game. In the 48 hours given we achieved a rather unique and scary game. We also had access to an Oculus Rift.

                                

Oculus Rift Device

This is really fun device which allows users to look around a scene using their heads. So they just move to look; we thought this would be perfect with a horror game. We decided to create a game similar to that of “Alone” which is an existing Oculus Rift game, but we tried to implement quite a few new features. I’ll update this blog when I get my hands on the project files to show you how it looked. The project we called "Synced" might be available soon on a few devices to play for yourself, so I'll let you know when I get more news.

Events like this will always be good to go to. Not only is it a personality test as you need to work in groups in harsh situations with a very fast deadline, but you get to test your own body without sleep.  Most people can’t handle it and end up sleeping under desks for a few hours. This time I actually stayed with local friends for the weekend but I still managed to get a lot done. I personally think no matter how good you are at time management, there are always things that creep up on you at the last minute. A gamejam is a nice way to test how you do under pressure and how much work is physically possible in the time given.