Zalo DS Blog

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Familiar Game Jam 4 - Dancing with wolves!


So, yeah, one more time our favorite jam was celebrated in Seville during the weekend of 20-22 March 2015. This jam is just growing and getting better with every new edition, all thanks to sergeeo. This time it was celebrated on what we call the Enjoy room on my current company Genera Games. So, for some of us that meant staying at the office the whole weekend (just changing from one room to another). Totally worth it :)


There were 48 presential participants plus more teams working from their places, ending up with a total of 32 videogames. If you want to join the next one pay atention to the twitter account because this last time the presential places flew away in a few hours. You can take a look at the games on the gamejolt  website (google chrome not recommended, because Google has recently stopped supporting the Unity player and most of the games use it)

The topic in this edition was movies from the nineties. So we had to chose a movie from that period and make a videogame based on that. And also the game had to cotain two different endings. You can imagine all of us searching on the internet the top charts from that time. We finally ended up chosing Dancing with Wolves, for several reasons. First, after all these years there aren't any videogames of that film. Second, we've been talking about making a dancing videogame during a long time. And third, we were sure nobody else were going to pick the same one :D

This time I was on a team with two of my workmates pedmuitor and brovador. I was in charge of the graphics (same thing happened on the First Familiar Game Jam, so I am kind of a senior jam artist ^_^U). During the first day we weren't sure if I should work on 3D or 2D. I finally went for 3D and started using 3ds max after all these years. I think it was a good decission because I could do lots of animations that in 2D would have been a pain (and less fun)

I didn't code a single line of code this time. Pedmuitor and Brovador did all the job. And if you are asking who did those wonderful menus it turned out brovador is a secret graphic designer. So basically the three of us were able to do this videogame you can play here (remember, no chrome)



It would be very unfair not to mention our music man. I never mentioned it before, but in the Familiar Game Jams there is a team of 3-4 guys doing the music for all the games. This time we were working with Carlos Vallejo who did a great job, you can listen to the music he did for us here

After the jam finished there was one week for meditating an voting. Our game received an overall score of 3.58 (over 5) and was ranked #9. Thanks everyone who voted us (except those who gave us low scores :D).

Take a look at the games (you can sort them by ranking) and enjoy. I'd like to finish this post with a video that was posted on youtube a few days after the jam took place showing you what a good time we had. See you on Familiar Game Jam 5!

PS: some links covering the event:
- Undead Aubergine enterview and their postmortem (spanish)
- JuegaRPG (spanish)
- Jupiter Hadley post also take a look at her video compilation series covering all the games