Familiar Game Jam 3 (one month later, yippiee!)

The third edition of the Familiar Game Jam took place the last October 17-18-19th. The Familiar Game Jam takes place in Seville (Spain) twice a year and the main purpose of the event is making a game in 48 hours based on the theme selected by the participants and surviving to tell your grandchildren

In this edition the chosen theme was misanthropy and the surprise element was neon lights. 27 games were presented on a jam that edition after edition grows in number of participants and quality of the games

The Rodriguez Team. From left to right: Chetrut, Rafa, Jesús and me.
Missing here are Sergio (music) and Javi Zumer (sound effects) 

It is a good opportunity to meet new people. I was on a team called The Rodriguez (don’t ask) and our product was called GameJamthropy, a Game Jam simulator were you try to code your great game but people talking doesn’t let you so you need to shut them up throwing beers into their heads



We really suffered the last two hours before finishing it, and at some point I was doubting we were going to have a working product, but at the end we manage to do it not without some errors (like that shader not compiling in windows causing all the game look completely pink)

Two weeks after the jam I went with Chetrut to the award’s ceremony and to our surprise the game was given the jury’s award. We would like to thank everyone again for this. Also we found a video on youtube of someone playing it and having some fun which is always very rewarding (and it has a lot of views!)

Being happy with GameJamThropy we decided to continue working on it, fixing the errors and today I have uploaded the final version so far. The code is available on github (it is not a good code to learn anything from, so don’t get too excited ;)) Wanna give it a try and show the world how good your coding skills are? (or how bad :P?) We have implemented higscores for that!

PLAY GAMEJAMTHROPY ON GAMEJOLT

Here are some other articles covering the event
- A playlist with videos of all the games that were presented
- Anait Games talking about it
- Juegonautas
- Offical twitter account
- The offical video that I cannot link properly becuase blogger is shit sometimes

See you on the fourth edition!

A brief introduction to Homebrew Development

These weeks I have been involved in some very interesting things.

Last October 16th I was given the chance by the people at Betabeers Seville to give a small introduction to hombrew development. Here it is, both in spanish and english

Desarrollo Homebrew
Homebrew Development

I will probably talk about this world a bit more at some point on Pixels and Coffe during next year so stay tuned

As a quick reflexion, I have always been interested in this kind of programming. Most of my profesional experience is related to the videogames industry but I consider myself more of a general programmer than just a videogames one. I think that a good knowledge of C++, compilers, and maths in general makes the difference against most other programmers. So basically I owe the people at the forums, those who wrote some of the amazing articles I read and all the community, a lot (btw I hate the word community)

Maybe the scene is a bit dead right now, but still there are lots of things you can learn if you know where to look for. And next year looks promising!