Tuesday, May 07, 2013
TOJAM
Hi everyone! So I wanted to blog twice in April, but that didn't happen. I have a blog-post ready about one of the webcomics my blog links to, called Buttersafe, but I didn't have it ready by the April 30th deadline... and now a bunch of things have happened, so I will have to postpone that blogpost for next time - so maybe I'll post it in maybe 10 days.
Today, I want to talk about TOJAM! But first, I want to mention Oyster Boy - the other day I went out with a few friends (new and old) to a restaurant in Toronto called Oyster Boy, which specializes in - you guessed it - Oysters! I've never been an Oyster Connoisseur, or anything like that. I wouldn't actively go out and order clams or mussels or oysters - I would go to all-you-can-eat-buffets and pick up several oysters to eat - I'd enjoy them, but I never actively bought them a la carte or anything... so this restaurant was a new experience for me.
In a way, it's kinda like the Black Hoof - the restaurant that Jon worked at - which was a Charcuterie; that is, the restaurants serves different meats and meat products in a very fresh form. You can read wikipedia for a quite different definition, but that's what I would say. So similarly, Oyster Boy had very fresh oysters and sold other delectables related to fresh or top-quality seafoods. They had baked oysters, fried oysters, seafood pastas, fish and chips, but the main draw of the place was their fresh oysters.
The oysters were really delicious - there were big ones and small ones, and they were all really fresh. They come with spices/sauces that you can put on if you want, as well as horseradish, but for the most part I'd prefer them by themselves. While they were good, they were also really expensive - there were 4 of us, so we ordered 2 dozen oysters to start, and that came out to $64 for 24 oysters, or $16 per person for 6 oysters each. Afterwards we bought some appetizers and we had fish tacos, seafood pasta, and fish and chips.
Overall it was a good meal, although very expensive - but that's what you have to pay if you want the freshest of seafoods. Ironically, earlier in the day we went out for Red Lobster for lunch. Anyway, I don't think I would be going there again except for very-social get-togethers. On a random note, next Summerlicious I want to make an early reservation for Bloke&Fourth, which looks to be another "Tapas"-ish place - that is, I assume, the entrees will be small appetizers, yet hopefully very fresh and top of the line.
Anyway, the Oyster Boy pictures are up on facebook now, if you want to take a look at the rest of them. And now, onto TOJAM!
So, last weekend was TOJAM, or the Toronto Indie Game Jam, where people get together and build a game, from scratch to finish, in just 3 days. The event has been happening every year, starting in 2006, and I have attended it 4 times previously, in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. I think in 2011 I was busy, and in 2012 the registrations filled up much faster than I have anticipated. So this year, as soon as I heard that registrations were open, I jumped on the chance and I registered right away. I told Duy about it and he registered too - we told Isaque, but he didn't register in time, so this year, it was just Duy and I.
This year, it was held again at the beautiful George Brown College campus near King and Sherbourne; they have state-of-the-art computers, good internet, good security, elevators, bathrooms - a definite step-up from 2007, which was held in a dingy warehouse of some sort. This year, there were 450 people, the most of any year ever; and this year, there were a bunch of sponsors, so we got a bunch of free stuff! We had two free breakfasts, two free dinners, free snacks, free drinks - it was pretty amazing. Parking was okay - we found a quick parking spot and it was $30 for the whole weekend, and we didn't feel like looking elsewhere so we just paid that.
This year, TOJAM was held on the first floor, the 5th floor, and the 6th floor - Duy and I were located on the 6th floor, in the furthest hallway. There were a few other programmers there, but for the most part, it was very quiet and very peaceful. That's good, because quiet is good - but it's also bad, because there was less social interaction, or like, there was less motivation from other nearby programmers and artists. However, this year there was a TOJAM twitter hashtag - #tojam - that we could all follow, and other programmers kept tweeting their progress throughout their weekend. You could almost say that I spent more time on twitter than on actual programming - but that would be a lie. But I did re-visit my twitter feed every 10 minutes or so.
That said, I made a few new friends! I met two of Duy's friends from Woodlands - Oskar and Randy - and thanks to twitter, I made a few more friends from the event. Now to be honest, there's a good chance some of these friends will just be acquaintances and I won't see them again until the next TOJAM or the TOJAM arcade, but you never know. Also I added Randy to facebook, and it turns out he plays magic! I haven't asked him yet how hardcore he is, but that's pretty neat.
The George Brown location is neat, and there are a few places to eat around - there's a Subway, there's a Pita place, there are two sushi places - and there's a Tim Hortons kinda far away, but no Burger Kings or McDonalds in sight. However, there was this bar place I decided to visit - called Bistro 243, located at 243 King Street. On the first night, both Duy and I decided to try their special of the day, which was a cheeseburger with pemeal bacon, alongside a pulled-pork poutine, just for $10. It turned out pretty good! It was a good value. Only bad thing is that it felt like I was going to have a heart-attack. You can see a picture of this on facebook.
It was so good, I went there again for lunch the day after, for a Linguine Carbonara. It was exactly everything that I wanted at that time - a rich, saucy, warm carb/starch meal. Yum yum yum, all for $12. I wanted to go back for a third time and have Fish and Chips, but I never made it back, seeing how we had two free dinners coming up, and my sunday lunch really consisted of snacking on chips and cookies from noon until dinner time.
So this year, the theme was "Uncooperative". I thought of several different ideas, but we ended up with: You are on a team, like The A-Team - so you go around and fight terrorists, or rescue people, or deal with super villains - just, overall good guy stuff. There are 4 of you, 3 of which are NPCs. But the twist is... you are the traitor! You receive other instructions from the evil boss, and you have to follow those and betray your team - you have to sabotage their missions, without revealing that you are indeed, the bad guy.
So we had planned to do 3 or more levels - in the first level, your team finds an enemy base, and you want to infiltrate it and take out their secret weapon. Of course, your "boss" calls you and tells you that you have to protect the secret weapon and let it escape; also, if possible, if you could minimize "enemy" casualties, that would be a bonus. How would that work out in the game?
You are given fake bullets, and your goal would be to shoot the enemy, so they can feign death, before your team shoots them with real bullets. There would be a "loyalty" meter which would increase if you 1) help the enemy and 2) still pretend to be a good guy, and it will decrease if you do the opposite. And then the first boss, there would be three mechanics:
1) There's a console which would drop a spike trap on the boss - so you have to, obviously, stop your teammates from accessing the console. How? You shoot them! But of course, you can't just do it blatantly. So what you would do is, you would line up a shot so that it would narrowly miss the boss, and still hit your teammate.
2) One of your teammates would start aiming a shot at the boss. So what do you do? You just have to get in the way, so that she can't aim anymore. and lastly,
3) One of your teammates will try to fire grenades at the boss... so we decided that if you shoot a bullet near a boss, it will signal to the boss to travel away from your bullet - so you can guide the boss to travel away from the grenades before they explode.
So after a while of fighting the boss, if you can build your "loyalty" meter, you will "beat" the boss and the boss will escape. Afterwards we put in a boss-escape sequence, where you would shoot down missiles that your team would be firing at the getaway "helicopter". After that, I thought about a prison-escape mission, but we didn't have enough time to implement that.
So what happened? Well, with only Duy and I there and no Isaque or any other people, I guess we didn't have that much motivation! So unfortunately, we did not get to complete our game. We did however, get the first level to work, along with a nice title screen and some cutscenes to start the action, so that was good. Anyway, the game deadline was 8:00pm on Sunday night, just before dinner time, closing ceremonies, raffles, and then the part where all the jammers play other people's games. At 7:50pm, one of our neighbors came by, and we asked him to playtest our game...
And it was hard! He didn't understand what he was supposed to do, there was too much happening on the screen at once - overall, it was a complete disaster. I mean, the graphics and animations were cool, but there was too much going on and overall, he just didn't know what to do. With only 10 minutes left, we didn't have enough time to add instructions or whatever to the game. Note to self: Get other people to test your game super early.
In any case, we had a super fun time, but our game did not meet our expectations. So when it was time to jam, we set up our game but I don't think anyone played it, or maybe just one person played it. I think the idea is that one person would stay back and explain to bypassers how to play the game, while the rest of the group would run around and play other people's games, and then take turns being the explainer - but this year there were only two of us so it was infeasible, plus we weren't super proud of our game, so we just left the game on its own.
Man, last time with Ricky in 2010, our game was super awesome and super complete and amazing and everything. This year, it was pretty disappointing. In any case, I will work on the game a little bit more, at least put in instructions and maybe a few sound effects, maybe even a game-over screen, and then maybe waaay later I'll add more levels. If there's a TOJAM arcade this year, you guys should come out and play our game and other games. I promise, our game would be much better by then :)
Speaking of other games, there were some really good ones! This "uncooperative" theme really brings out some good gems. I will just highlight a few games... there was this one game called Fishticuffs, which was an 8-player game, hooked up on a nice large tv with 8 xbox360 controllers, but you could play with 2+ people. Each person controls multiple fish, but everyone travels together in a school of fish, but each person has a little influence in which way the group travels. There's a co-op mode, but in vs. mode, your goal is to kill all the other fish in the school and be the last remaining fish. I found it to be a super fun game :)
There was another game which is kinda (not at all) like Super Mario, where there are players and there is a "god" - it was a 2-player racing game, but there was also a God player, which would try to ruin everything by throwing meteors and tornadoes at the players while they were racing. I thought that was kinda neat. There were a lot of multiplayer games with xbox controllers, there were network games - there were ipad games, or games with touchscreen monitors - there were two games that uses the new Oculus Rift Virtual-Reality glasses; and there was also a game were the controller was a MIDI controller, with 64 buttons and switches and things.
Lastly, there was a game called We Are the Brain, that is a 9-player game, played with a total of 3 xbox controllers. At the start of the game, you figure out who you are - left foot, right foot, heart, left eye, right hand, lungs, etc - and then when you start, all 9 of you are controlling one person who is driving a car. So the right foot takes care of the gas, the hands help each other steer - the heart has to regulate a good heartrate, lungs have to remember to breathe, eyes have to blink periodically - it was a pretty silly game, but I thought I would mention it :)
And that's it! Overall it was a great experience. I missed it in 2011 and 2012 and I'm glad to be back, although it would've been nicer if we had more people, and if we actually finished our game. Next year, we'll go again, but this time we'll get a group ready way in advance. Oh yeah, we can request to have the hallway again or to have us sit in an actual room with people - maybe if there's a big group of us, it's better if we take up the entire hallway, haha. Anyway, pictures are up on facebook now, and we have the current version of the game if you really want to play it. Also, I took a bit of video at the Jam; a little bit of the opening and closing ceremonies, but most of it was in the Jam part itself at the end, so if you want to see some of the games in action, just see me. I want to put together a compilation video like I always do, but I might not have the time to do that right now.
So that brings us to now... well, yesterday, after Magic, the VCSA president messaged me on facebook, asking me if Duy and I would like to join the technical team at Len Duong this year. At first, I didn't want to go - I've been to Len Duong in 2009 and 2010, I missed 2011 and 2012, and I've gone twice already and I'm already pretty old... so I didn't want to go. But... now I think it's actually a good idea. It's actually really good of her to have contacted me yesterday - a week earlier, I think my answer would still be no. Why?
Well, a few weeks ago I went to a birthday party in Toronto, held by friends from Len Duong whom I haven't seen in over a year. Then last Thursday, I went out to Toronto, to hang out with VSA friends at the Oyster Boy, some of whom I haven't seen in 3+ years, and some that I have just met. And this last weekend, I've reunited with a group of people that I haven't seen since 2010 - and I got to enjoy a memorable weekend with friends, new and old, that I haven't seen for a long time. And now, she asks me if I want to hang out with people that I haven't seen since 2010, and to enjoy a memorable weekend with them? Sign me up!
So it's amazingly good timing of her. And now that Duy and I are going to work on the technical team, we have convinced Vinh to go as a camper too!
Anyway, that's it! So, in about two weeks, I will post an entry about Buttersafe - also, Mai and Jon are coming back this Thursday! Also, I started watching Initial D, the 5th "season", and the last two episodes will be airing next week, and the subbed versions shortly after! Then in early June, we're going a cruise vacation! And then we're going to Len Duong! And then, i just checked - Summerlicious will be happening July 5th - 21st! So let's get ready for that! Bloke&Fourth, here we come!
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Today, I want to talk about TOJAM! But first, I want to mention Oyster Boy - the other day I went out with a few friends (new and old) to a restaurant in Toronto called Oyster Boy, which specializes in - you guessed it - Oysters! I've never been an Oyster Connoisseur, or anything like that. I wouldn't actively go out and order clams or mussels or oysters - I would go to all-you-can-eat-buffets and pick up several oysters to eat - I'd enjoy them, but I never actively bought them a la carte or anything... so this restaurant was a new experience for me.
In a way, it's kinda like the Black Hoof - the restaurant that Jon worked at - which was a Charcuterie; that is, the restaurants serves different meats and meat products in a very fresh form. You can read wikipedia for a quite different definition, but that's what I would say. So similarly, Oyster Boy had very fresh oysters and sold other delectables related to fresh or top-quality seafoods. They had baked oysters, fried oysters, seafood pastas, fish and chips, but the main draw of the place was their fresh oysters.
The oysters were really delicious - there were big ones and small ones, and they were all really fresh. They come with spices/sauces that you can put on if you want, as well as horseradish, but for the most part I'd prefer them by themselves. While they were good, they were also really expensive - there were 4 of us, so we ordered 2 dozen oysters to start, and that came out to $64 for 24 oysters, or $16 per person for 6 oysters each. Afterwards we bought some appetizers and we had fish tacos, seafood pasta, and fish and chips.
Overall it was a good meal, although very expensive - but that's what you have to pay if you want the freshest of seafoods. Ironically, earlier in the day we went out for Red Lobster for lunch. Anyway, I don't think I would be going there again except for very-social get-togethers. On a random note, next Summerlicious I want to make an early reservation for Bloke&Fourth, which looks to be another "Tapas"-ish place - that is, I assume, the entrees will be small appetizers, yet hopefully very fresh and top of the line.
Anyway, the Oyster Boy pictures are up on facebook now, if you want to take a look at the rest of them. And now, onto TOJAM!
So, last weekend was TOJAM, or the Toronto Indie Game Jam, where people get together and build a game, from scratch to finish, in just 3 days. The event has been happening every year, starting in 2006, and I have attended it 4 times previously, in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. I think in 2011 I was busy, and in 2012 the registrations filled up much faster than I have anticipated. So this year, as soon as I heard that registrations were open, I jumped on the chance and I registered right away. I told Duy about it and he registered too - we told Isaque, but he didn't register in time, so this year, it was just Duy and I.
This year, it was held again at the beautiful George Brown College campus near King and Sherbourne; they have state-of-the-art computers, good internet, good security, elevators, bathrooms - a definite step-up from 2007, which was held in a dingy warehouse of some sort. This year, there were 450 people, the most of any year ever; and this year, there were a bunch of sponsors, so we got a bunch of free stuff! We had two free breakfasts, two free dinners, free snacks, free drinks - it was pretty amazing. Parking was okay - we found a quick parking spot and it was $30 for the whole weekend, and we didn't feel like looking elsewhere so we just paid that.
This year, TOJAM was held on the first floor, the 5th floor, and the 6th floor - Duy and I were located on the 6th floor, in the furthest hallway. There were a few other programmers there, but for the most part, it was very quiet and very peaceful. That's good, because quiet is good - but it's also bad, because there was less social interaction, or like, there was less motivation from other nearby programmers and artists. However, this year there was a TOJAM twitter hashtag - #tojam - that we could all follow, and other programmers kept tweeting their progress throughout their weekend. You could almost say that I spent more time on twitter than on actual programming - but that would be a lie. But I did re-visit my twitter feed every 10 minutes or so.
That said, I made a few new friends! I met two of Duy's friends from Woodlands - Oskar and Randy - and thanks to twitter, I made a few more friends from the event. Now to be honest, there's a good chance some of these friends will just be acquaintances and I won't see them again until the next TOJAM or the TOJAM arcade, but you never know. Also I added Randy to facebook, and it turns out he plays magic! I haven't asked him yet how hardcore he is, but that's pretty neat.
The George Brown location is neat, and there are a few places to eat around - there's a Subway, there's a Pita place, there are two sushi places - and there's a Tim Hortons kinda far away, but no Burger Kings or McDonalds in sight. However, there was this bar place I decided to visit - called Bistro 243, located at 243 King Street. On the first night, both Duy and I decided to try their special of the day, which was a cheeseburger with pemeal bacon, alongside a pulled-pork poutine, just for $10. It turned out pretty good! It was a good value. Only bad thing is that it felt like I was going to have a heart-attack. You can see a picture of this on facebook.
It was so good, I went there again for lunch the day after, for a Linguine Carbonara. It was exactly everything that I wanted at that time - a rich, saucy, warm carb/starch meal. Yum yum yum, all for $12. I wanted to go back for a third time and have Fish and Chips, but I never made it back, seeing how we had two free dinners coming up, and my sunday lunch really consisted of snacking on chips and cookies from noon until dinner time.
So this year, the theme was "Uncooperative". I thought of several different ideas, but we ended up with: You are on a team, like The A-Team - so you go around and fight terrorists, or rescue people, or deal with super villains - just, overall good guy stuff. There are 4 of you, 3 of which are NPCs. But the twist is... you are the traitor! You receive other instructions from the evil boss, and you have to follow those and betray your team - you have to sabotage their missions, without revealing that you are indeed, the bad guy.
So we had planned to do 3 or more levels - in the first level, your team finds an enemy base, and you want to infiltrate it and take out their secret weapon. Of course, your "boss" calls you and tells you that you have to protect the secret weapon and let it escape; also, if possible, if you could minimize "enemy" casualties, that would be a bonus. How would that work out in the game?
You are given fake bullets, and your goal would be to shoot the enemy, so they can feign death, before your team shoots them with real bullets. There would be a "loyalty" meter which would increase if you 1) help the enemy and 2) still pretend to be a good guy, and it will decrease if you do the opposite. And then the first boss, there would be three mechanics:
1) There's a console which would drop a spike trap on the boss - so you have to, obviously, stop your teammates from accessing the console. How? You shoot them! But of course, you can't just do it blatantly. So what you would do is, you would line up a shot so that it would narrowly miss the boss, and still hit your teammate.
2) One of your teammates would start aiming a shot at the boss. So what do you do? You just have to get in the way, so that she can't aim anymore. and lastly,
3) One of your teammates will try to fire grenades at the boss... so we decided that if you shoot a bullet near a boss, it will signal to the boss to travel away from your bullet - so you can guide the boss to travel away from the grenades before they explode.
So after a while of fighting the boss, if you can build your "loyalty" meter, you will "beat" the boss and the boss will escape. Afterwards we put in a boss-escape sequence, where you would shoot down missiles that your team would be firing at the getaway "helicopter". After that, I thought about a prison-escape mission, but we didn't have enough time to implement that.
So what happened? Well, with only Duy and I there and no Isaque or any other people, I guess we didn't have that much motivation! So unfortunately, we did not get to complete our game. We did however, get the first level to work, along with a nice title screen and some cutscenes to start the action, so that was good. Anyway, the game deadline was 8:00pm on Sunday night, just before dinner time, closing ceremonies, raffles, and then the part where all the jammers play other people's games. At 7:50pm, one of our neighbors came by, and we asked him to playtest our game...
And it was hard! He didn't understand what he was supposed to do, there was too much happening on the screen at once - overall, it was a complete disaster. I mean, the graphics and animations were cool, but there was too much going on and overall, he just didn't know what to do. With only 10 minutes left, we didn't have enough time to add instructions or whatever to the game. Note to self: Get other people to test your game super early.
In any case, we had a super fun time, but our game did not meet our expectations. So when it was time to jam, we set up our game but I don't think anyone played it, or maybe just one person played it. I think the idea is that one person would stay back and explain to bypassers how to play the game, while the rest of the group would run around and play other people's games, and then take turns being the explainer - but this year there were only two of us so it was infeasible, plus we weren't super proud of our game, so we just left the game on its own.
Man, last time with Ricky in 2010, our game was super awesome and super complete and amazing and everything. This year, it was pretty disappointing. In any case, I will work on the game a little bit more, at least put in instructions and maybe a few sound effects, maybe even a game-over screen, and then maybe waaay later I'll add more levels. If there's a TOJAM arcade this year, you guys should come out and play our game and other games. I promise, our game would be much better by then :)
Speaking of other games, there were some really good ones! This "uncooperative" theme really brings out some good gems. I will just highlight a few games... there was this one game called Fishticuffs, which was an 8-player game, hooked up on a nice large tv with 8 xbox360 controllers, but you could play with 2+ people. Each person controls multiple fish, but everyone travels together in a school of fish, but each person has a little influence in which way the group travels. There's a co-op mode, but in vs. mode, your goal is to kill all the other fish in the school and be the last remaining fish. I found it to be a super fun game :)
There was another game which is kinda (not at all) like Super Mario, where there are players and there is a "god" - it was a 2-player racing game, but there was also a God player, which would try to ruin everything by throwing meteors and tornadoes at the players while they were racing. I thought that was kinda neat. There were a lot of multiplayer games with xbox controllers, there were network games - there were ipad games, or games with touchscreen monitors - there were two games that uses the new Oculus Rift Virtual-Reality glasses; and there was also a game were the controller was a MIDI controller, with 64 buttons and switches and things.
Lastly, there was a game called We Are the Brain, that is a 9-player game, played with a total of 3 xbox controllers. At the start of the game, you figure out who you are - left foot, right foot, heart, left eye, right hand, lungs, etc - and then when you start, all 9 of you are controlling one person who is driving a car. So the right foot takes care of the gas, the hands help each other steer - the heart has to regulate a good heartrate, lungs have to remember to breathe, eyes have to blink periodically - it was a pretty silly game, but I thought I would mention it :)
And that's it! Overall it was a great experience. I missed it in 2011 and 2012 and I'm glad to be back, although it would've been nicer if we had more people, and if we actually finished our game. Next year, we'll go again, but this time we'll get a group ready way in advance. Oh yeah, we can request to have the hallway again or to have us sit in an actual room with people - maybe if there's a big group of us, it's better if we take up the entire hallway, haha. Anyway, pictures are up on facebook now, and we have the current version of the game if you really want to play it. Also, I took a bit of video at the Jam; a little bit of the opening and closing ceremonies, but most of it was in the Jam part itself at the end, so if you want to see some of the games in action, just see me. I want to put together a compilation video like I always do, but I might not have the time to do that right now.
So that brings us to now... well, yesterday, after Magic, the VCSA president messaged me on facebook, asking me if Duy and I would like to join the technical team at Len Duong this year. At first, I didn't want to go - I've been to Len Duong in 2009 and 2010, I missed 2011 and 2012, and I've gone twice already and I'm already pretty old... so I didn't want to go. But... now I think it's actually a good idea. It's actually really good of her to have contacted me yesterday - a week earlier, I think my answer would still be no. Why?
Well, a few weeks ago I went to a birthday party in Toronto, held by friends from Len Duong whom I haven't seen in over a year. Then last Thursday, I went out to Toronto, to hang out with VSA friends at the Oyster Boy, some of whom I haven't seen in 3+ years, and some that I have just met. And this last weekend, I've reunited with a group of people that I haven't seen since 2010 - and I got to enjoy a memorable weekend with friends, new and old, that I haven't seen for a long time. And now, she asks me if I want to hang out with people that I haven't seen since 2010, and to enjoy a memorable weekend with them? Sign me up!
So it's amazingly good timing of her. And now that Duy and I are going to work on the technical team, we have convinced Vinh to go as a camper too!
Anyway, that's it! So, in about two weeks, I will post an entry about Buttersafe - also, Mai and Jon are coming back this Thursday! Also, I started watching Initial D, the 5th "season", and the last two episodes will be airing next week, and the subbed versions shortly after! Then in early June, we're going a cruise vacation! And then we're going to Len Duong! And then, i just checked - Summerlicious will be happening July 5th - 21st! So let's get ready for that! Bloke&Fourth, here we come!