Global Game Jam, January 27-29th 2012

This was the fourth annual Global Game Jam, and I've been lucky enough to attend every year - it's an event I look forward to.  Aside from the usual "achievements" (optional restrictions to help focus your game designs), this year's theme was pretty simple: an ouroboros.

This year's theme. This exact thing.

Luckily, an image such as this can be interpreted several ways, and the game pitches reflected that.  The team I ended up on took the theme a bit more literally, borrowing a concept from American folklore: the hoopsnake.

What Went Right

Our goals for this project were to build on what has been successful in previous years: keep the game simple, and keep the humor high.  In that regard, we did quite well.

Hoopsnake! is a side-scrolling platformer, utilizing only one button as the game mechanic.  The hoopsnake constantly grows larger; grow too large and he'll fall apart, Game Over.  Press the space bar for him to take a bite of himself to get smaller; go too far and he eats himself out of existence.  You want to be small to fit through narrow passages, and you want to be large to be able to catch yourself on ledges after being propelled up by spring-coil copperhead snakes.  Eat all the doughnuts on the level to continue.

The humor is best exemplified by the soundtrack.  When you hit a spring-snake and are propelled upward, the game goes into a bullet-time state, and a bit of The Ballad of the Hoopsnake plays (also available as a separate track).  The overall goofiness of it earned us a standing ovation during our presentation.

What Went Wrong

Our team of programmers (myself included) didn't feel particularly strongly about a game engine, so we tried to pick something that we could all share.  Ultimately we settled on Java, using MarteEngine.  We made it work, although it's not the best engine for the design we had.  Most notably, MarteEngine is a tile-based platformer engine, where something like Hoopsnake! may have better benefited from something smoother or vector-based, like Flash.  As such, we had to get around this weird problem of the hoopsnake effectively falling down stairs, instead of rolling down a hill.

I felt the art could have been crisper, as well.  MarteEngine uses sprites, and one of the issues I worked on was making the animation of the hoopsnake work.  There was a lot of futzing with sprite animations and scale percentages, and ultimately we couldn't get it to look the way we wanted - but it doesn't matter so much because the hoopsnake rotates so fast that you'd barely notice the animation anyway.

As is usually the case with these projects, it would have been nice to have a bit more time at the end to polish what we had and focus a bit more on level design.  I feel it looks a bit clunky and rushed, but then again, it was only built in a weekend!

What to Improve

I think the successes of Hoopsnake! outweigh its shortcomings.  I only wish I had the time and money to learn several game engines to be better prepared for working with other programmers, or to invest into a single game engine, take the lead on the project, and be able to teach others.  But, that's more of a personal problem, and I enjoy tackling this problem with more game jams.

Download the Hoopsnake! project at this page.