Labor Day signals the end of summer, the end of wearing white pants and the return of school. For Wild Pockets this means that we must say goodbye to some excellent summer interns (some we wish we could hire today!) as they return to their college programs and it also means that all of our summer camp programs have ended.
With the start of a new school year, we learned that Wild Pockets would be introduced in various college courses and the focus of one in particular. With that, we welcome all of our new friends from Howard University! Planning to use Wild Pockets in your classroom? Let us know!
Education has always been one of our major focuses and we have developed a series of curriculum that were designed to teach middle school, high school and college students game design while also giving them confidence in themselves to improve their public speaking, time management, teamwork and a host of other soft skills. If you are interested in learning more about the Wild Pockets Curriculum please contact Emily Skopic.
Hopefully we'll see you in the classroom soon!
Last fall, Wild Pockets CEO, Shanna Tellerman was invited to speak at several Girl Geeks events in Leeds and Dundee. Her presentations were well received and have finally made their way to the internet. We invite you to watch.
School may be out for summer but you’d never know it around the Wlid Pockets offices. Summer vacation brings summer camps and Wild Pockets has been heavily involved in a handful of themaround the country and most heavily involved in the two Pittsburgh camps that are only a mile or so from our office. The Tchno Teens camp recently ended and it was a wonderful experience that we are very proud of.
Late last year we partnered with the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh and Catalyst Connection to develop a game design curriculum for their Techno Teens Program (formerly called Pittsburgh DigiPen Game Development Camp.) Techno Teens is a video game development camp that was designed to reach at-risk youth and expose them to technology, math and science concepts using a hands-on approach while improving the typical student/teacher ratio. Not only do the students learn how to make a video game, they learned about teamwork, time management and giving presentations while also hearing from people working in the local technology industry and touring various companies and schools.
This is the 6th year that the Urban League and Catalyst Connection have offered the program but this year they wanted to take this program several steps farther. They wanted to not only extend the summer camp to 3 weeks but turn the entire program into a year-long imitative and offer a variety of workshops, speakers and field trips throughout the rest of the year. We have been very excited about this program and on July 6th, all of our hard work was put to the test as 40+ students were accepted into the Techno Teens Program and jumped right in with very little, if any, programming or game development experience.
I checked in on the camp every few days but tried to avoid ruining the surprise of their final game presentation. On, Friday, July 16th, I attended the final presentations and was astonished by the quality of the games and presentations the students delivered!
You can play (and rate) all of the games at http://technoteens.weebly.com.
The teams won various prizes (best art, best character, best story, best presentation) and opened the games up for an hour before the presentations so the public could help determine the best game. Gummy Land won Best Game (and the students took home new digital cameras!)
Today we released Wild Pockets version 1.6.6 which includes a lot of minor fixes and engine changes. The biggest of these is the inclusion of a flag which allows friction to work in non axis-aligned directions which makes avatar game creation easier. Below is a full list of bug fixes and changes in this version.
Bug fixes:
Changes:
WOW did that event seem to fly by! While the game jam is only 24 hours of development for each of the teams, it goes from 9am Saturday until 5pm Sunday. That’s a 32 hour event!
I can’t even count the number of people that stayed up all night, mostly because I fell asleep for 6 hours.
This year we saw a lot of familiar faces including the Poindexters (winners of the 2009 Bay Area Game Jam), the Joker’s Wild (winners of the 2009 PA Game Jam) and Team Abrams who won 3rd place in both the 2009 Bay Area and PA Game Jams but came to compete this year under the name IdeomotorFX.
At the end of the day, we had 14 teams that submitted 15 games for judging and for the first time ever, we had a tie at first place! To make it an even more unique finish, the games that tied were created by the same team – last year’s winner and now repeat Wild Pockets Game Jam Champions, the Poindexters, with their games Eternal Velocity and Destory the Core. They were awarded the 1st and 2nd place prizes and 3rd place went to former game jam champion, the Joker’s Wild for their game Indirection.
In addition to the judge's prizes, the Wild Pockets staff gave out a handful of awards. The Formed On-Site Award and $50 were given to a team that didn’t have the luxury of planning any game elements as a team ahead of time, but still submitted a really cool game. This was awarded to Smash Team 3000/9000 for their game Smash. This team was also chosen to receive the Outstanding Art Award and took home a sweet bobble head trophy! There was alot of amazing art this year (some of the best ever), but Smash Team 3000/9000 stood out from the pack by showing off a complex main character with its own set of animations and producing a collection of secondary assets that would be at home in a commercial product.
Also taking home a bobble head trophy was The Martians for their game Mars Invasion: 1 A.A. which won a technology award which we call the First Penguin Award. This is awarded to a team that attempts a particularly ambitious project, even though it fails. It is named after the first penguin in a group who tests the water for sharks by jumping in to find out. This is the bravest penguin, and while it may not always live to see the other side, it does shine in the moment of courage. The team built a networked system whereby, using HTTP requests, they could design a level on one machine, and Wild Pockets, over the network, could read the spreadsheet and generate the level. It was really cool, and it actually worked! But, late in the Game Jam, they just didn't have time to actually get their game up and running, especially after a last-minute accidental overwrite of the most updated version. In the last 30 minutes, they managed to get a back-up copy working to a point where it could be judged, they didn’t lose their cool, and afterward told us they had a great time at the event! We hope they take some time to finish Mars Invasion: 1 A.A. and update the live copy so everyone can see what we saw!
We streamed the event live on Ustream and video archives are available on our channel. Photos from the event are on our Flikr stream. If you took any photos at the event, feel free to add them to our set..
Full list of games:
Another Castle
Around the World in 9 Holes
Destroy the Core
Dust to Dust
Eternal Velocity
Indirection
Lost in the Maze
Mars Invasion
Paint the Penguin
Pirate Shippers
Poltermice the Haunted Mouse
Smash
SurFree
Zoomy Space Ship Game
Many, Many, Many thanks go to the Biz Spark One, Windows 7, Windows Phone and Xbox 360 teams at Microsoft who graciously sponsored the event. We also have to thank the Microsoft Conference Center staff for making this our best event yet!
Thanks to Quarter Circle Jab and the OneUps for performing to an exhausted but attentative audience during the awards ceremony and SK Telecom Ventures for making the concert possible. You are all a pleasure to work with!
Finally we need to thank all of our attendees for coming to the game jam, providing all the feedback and encouraging words about our platform. As exhausting as these events are to plan, organize and manage, we always leave energized and excited about the future of Wild Pockets. Thank you for being part of it.