Last weekend I was able to participate in a programming event at Full Sail. It was called The Play Mine. Up to 24 people could participate in a 24 hour programming event that went from noon on Saturday, July 18th to noon on Sunday, July 19th. We had to all work together to see how much of a game we could put together in that time. I signed up earlier in the week and to my surprise my name was on the list to participate. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do too much, mainly because everyone else there was ahead of my in terms of classes. I decided to still show up and give it my best.
Saturday at Noon
Only 19 out of the 20 decided to stay and participate throughout the entire event. We were given the task of making a game that would also be playable as a board game. We were armed with our Visual Studio IDE’s, our knowledge of C++, and the DirectX SDK. After brainstorming for an hour or two we came up with a semi-concrete game idea. The next 22 hours were going to be divided up into 4 iterations. We split ourselves into teams and each team had their own goal to reach by the end of the iteration.
The First Iteration
The team I was on was responsible for the tile/map system. We had to have a working tile engine for us to make maps in a few hours. After we got all the coding done, as well as fog of war rendering on top of our tiles, we were still at a loss. We had to have some way to generate maps to use with our tile engine. I had the idea of using Mappy, which is a free, open source tile-based map editor. We all decided this would be fine because we were aiming for creating the game as fast as possible. It wouldn’t have been worth it to be working on a map editor.
Sunday…. Noon…. A Game Called Yella
After 2 cases of Monster, and a quick debugging session that was cut down to less than an hour, we were finally at the end of the 24 hours. Our final product…. a game called Yella.
Screenshots
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Download
Check out http://theplaymine.com/?page_id=11 for a download of Yella if you dare.
