This year we (Granite Games Limited) are site managers alongside Ben Wratten (from the Digital Greenhouse) of Guernsey’s Global Games Jam. The Digital Greenhouse are kindly hosting the event as they have done for the previous few years. There’s currently 11 of us and you can sign up for the Guernsey Global Games Jam 2018 here!
The event is not just limited to creating video games, people can also make board games and electronic games. You don’t need to be an expert either and people will be around to help when they can.
Granite Games started after the second Guernsey Global Games Jam and I would highly recommend going to meet people and from a learning perspective.
A lot of people turn up near the end of the events, particularly with children, to play the games we’ve created and watch the presentations at the end. If you’re not coming to the event, feel free to pop in near the end.
Jotter.io was a simplistic note taking application enabling you to take notes in three forms: notes, doodles and tables. Jotter was built in a responsive way to ensure maximum support for a variety of devices. All forms of note automatically save on the fly.
Jotter.io was one of my first web projects and never really took off, primary because I started using FastMail which solved the problem I had with note taking on the web and so never finished it.
I’ve decided to re-purpose jotter.io so the site will be re-launching soon with a new purpose!
For portfolio purposes, I’ve attached some screenshots of the app.
This is just a post to note that I’m closing up vote.gg, I’m not going to have the time to do the project justice and I haven’t worked on it in some time. And to be honest I’ve lost faith in the system after Brexit and Donald Trump. The domain expires in 2018 – if anyone wants it for a good cause let me know.
vote.gg was going to be a site for voting on and building legislation in a mash up of Reddit and Wikipedia. People would be able to post the initial document and others would be able to amend and add pros/cons. After a few rounds, the document would be put to a vote. We planned to have anonymous voting and even delegated voting. Delegated voting would be saying “I know nothing about this subject but my good friend Jason Magee does – he can decide on my behalf”.
Anyway, just for portfolio purposes, I’ve attached some screenshots of how far we got as I’m going to point the domain at a simple page until it expires.
Last years Global Games Jam lead to the creation of Sacrificial Inferno. For those who don’t know, Sacrificial Inferno is a procedurally generated, permadeath, hack and slash, retro 2D platformer which we’re working on. As you can imagine I was pretty excited to attend again this year.
Initially, Marc and I agreed to team up but we ended up with a team of five shortly after arriving. Four programmers and an artist/sound-man. Shortly after the theme of ‘waves’ was announced, we toyed with a couple of ideas but ultimately ended up creating Stealth Shoal. Stealth Shoal turned out to be a terrible name for a game but the game itself went really well. The objective is to get as many fish to join your shoal as possible while avoiding islands, whales (navigate by sonar) and fishing boats. The whales are the primary link to the theme as they use sonar waves to locate the fish. Check out the video below.
This year we even managed to upload the game to the Global Games Jam website here.
The big team turned out to be an excellent idea as I learnt quite a bit by trying new things I otherwise wouldn’t. A smaller team would have lead us to create a comfortable game rather than pushing boundaries.
Recently I’;ve spent a lot of time learning Blender for game development and fancied experimenting with something a bit different. Below I’;ve linked to two abstract art type of renders that turned out pretty good. The purple one was meant to have volumetric lighting but sadly my AMD card didn’;t seem to want to render it. Fortunately it turned out okay.
Both are the ultra-wide resolution of 3440x1440 and available to do with as you please.
