by Antonio Sanchez
culture@dailylobo.com
Empty energy drink bottles littered the halls of UNM’s Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media building Sunday night as a horde of bodies rushed from one room to another. Fear not, zombie slayers; this ghoulish gang was not the walking dead. They were exhausted game developers.
Local developers took part in this weekend’s Global Game Jam, a video-game-developing event in which participants across 300 cities create and produced games in 48 hours. The Global Game Jam is not a contest but instead a challenge for game developers everywhere to test their talents. Developers were allowed to create any style of game as long as it fell in line with this year’s theme: a beating heart. During the weekend, UNM’s IFDM building hosted 35 Albuquerque game developers who were separated into production teams that produced a combined six games.
At the end of the 48 hours, production teams presented their final product and uploaded their games to the Global Game Jam website, from which anyone can download and play any game. The Albuquerque teams presented their games to the Doña Ana County and Las Cruces teams via webcam on Sunday.
Although each team had the same theme, no two games were alike. One game made players virtual assassins, searching for their kill by listening for an irregular heartbeat; another game allowed players to control a person’s blood flow, pushing potentially deadly viruses from a susceptible organ to a virus-killing organ.
UNM student Jeremy Bernstein was the lead developer for the IFDM team “Coffee, We Like It,” which produced the first-person suspense game “There Was a Hole.” In the game, players walk through a snowy forest in search of their heart. The closer players get to their heart, the faster the heart beats. As each beat is heard, the player’s vision flashes between their snowy surroundings and a gloomy red “other world” where the player’s “inner demons” can be seen following them. The primary goal is to reach your heart before your inner demons reach you.
Bernstein, who slept only four hours throughout the 48-hour competition, said sleep deprivation played a key role in the competition.
“When you start falling asleep, you can’t think anymore. You start to get sloppy; you kind of tend to make mistakes, and you do tend to work slower, so there is a balance you have to make between being well-rested,” Bernstein said.
Bernstein wasn’t the only exhausted participant. The co-lead designer for “There Was a Hole,” Eric Geusz, brought a sleeping bag and pillow to the event, only to find himself one of many other cranky designers standing outside Sunday night at 1:30 a.m. after someone pulled a fire alarm in the building.
“There Was a Hole” lead art developer Ryan Knudsen, who fell asleep on his keyboard Sunday afternoon, said he has participated in the Global Game Jam since it began in 2009.
“You kind of have to come into these events knowing you won’t always walk away with a completed game, but it’s always a great learning experience,” he said.
Albuquerque Game Jam co-organizer Teri Farley said the annual event gives game developers an opportunity to network with other developers and showcase their work.
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“There have been students who have paired up with others they have met at Game Jam and gone off to create their own games. You never know who you’re going to meet, where these kind of adventures can take you,” Farley said. “My big goal with everything I do here is to promote the industry here in New Mexico and make it so that when people graduate from these programs, like the IFDM program, that they have jobs to go into.”
