Blitz 1UP

Making games in 48hrs with no sleep and pizza.

This year Blitz 1UP and IndieCity hosted one of the sites for Global Game Jam 2011. The event took place at Birmingham City University’s space in Millennium Point and ran from 7pm Friday to the same time on Sunday (alongside 'Britain’s Got Talent'!). Many thanks go to BCU for use of the venue.


The event was sponsored by Blue GFX and Audiomotion, who kept us all in pizza and caffeinated beverages throughout the weekend. Each person also received an IndieCity goodie bag which included:
All of that in a slick durable Blitz Games Studios bag to take it all home in.


Friday started out with packing the car and driving up to the venue (thanks to Blitz Games Studio's CEO Philip Oliver for the lift there and back!). The car was pretty full so it was a great relief to finally arrive and be able to climb out from under the mountain of bags and boxes to unload and set up.


We were still setting up when the first Game Jammers arrived so we signed them in, gave them their goodies and showed them to the computer suite.


The area provided by the university was an exceptional computer lab, with 25 high-powered PCs, all with dual monitor setups. There was also a projector and, at the very front, Forza with a custom cockpit spread over 3 HD screens (very slick indeed).

25 individuals signed up for the event and out of those 23 showed up so we had a pretty good turn out. Once all of the jammers had arrived we were taken through fire and safety procedures by Andrew Wilson from BCU.



PiD (Scott MacKintosh) walked everyone through the rules and then booted up the GGJ official keynote which included a video from Keita Takahashi, the creator of 'Katamari Damacy' and 'Noby Noby Boy'.

Philip Oliver was also kind enough to say a few words of encouragement which were really appreciated by everyone at the event.


After the keynote was over the theme “Extinction” was announced and all of the jammers split into groups. In the end there were six teams formed, ranging from one to five individuals.

Once the teams were assembled everyone immediately got on to brainstorming and setting up their environments. In the end the six teams came up with six very different plans and the real challenge began… eating 15 large Domino's pizzas!


Pizza successfully devoured, we headed back to the computer lab where coders, artists, musicians and designers put on their best brains and got to work. Heads down and minds buzzing, the atmosphere was intense.

A big thanks to Andrew Wilson and Richard Coubry for their hard work in quickly resolving the few minor PC niggles that always come up at these sort of events!


At this point we were sharing our live webcam feed with the world and PiD was giving regular updates via twitter, along with the occasional blog post on the IndieCity website.

'At 3am I went off to grab some sleep. At 6am I got up and expected to come into an empty lab, only to find everyone looking a little worse for wear but still tapping away on keyboards. Minus team Board games make you sexy anyway, who decided to go home for a proper night’s sleep... Wusses! - Kory Vandenberg, Assistant Producer for Blitz 1UP


The rest of the weekend passed in a blur as each team cracked on with their work, only occasionally stopping to use the bathroom or eat another astonishing round of pizza, chocolate, flapjacks, giant cola-bottles and down some Redbull.

Saturday was full on development with hardly a chance to breathe and so much going on that it was impossible to keep track of what teams or individuals were up to. Late in the day we also started to see random wanderings from team Board games make you sexy as they came into the room to jump off desks, climb up walls or stick tiny cards to random objects!?


By Sunday everyone was still enthusiastic and working hard, though we did have people falling asleep on desks and passing out on chairs. It was very exciting, intense and ultimately indescribable. Most of the teams worked up to the wire, literally only finishing their game minutes before the 3:00pm deadline.


At 4pm the judges arrived and we all moved into the presentation room to share what we’d created and talk about each others' games. This years judges included Paul Taylor from Mode 7 Games (developers of the awesome-looking Frozen Synapse), Deejay from Binary Tweed (developer of Clover: A Curious Tale), plus Andrew Wilson and Mak Sharma of Birmingham City University. In the end we managed to produce just over six games and we're proud to present them to you here:

IndieCity Global Game Jam 2011 games:


Faceless

A first-person psychological thriller. Flee a derelict hospital infected with a killer amorphous shadow being. Use light to keep the creature at bay but be careful as your batteries will run out!

play it now


Retro Revenge

Top-down shooter. Retro games have been forgotten and they're not happy about it, so they’ve joined together with a plan to invade earth. Only Steven Hawking in his modified super-wheelchair can save the day!

play it now

Bonus Game – Carve

Created by Ferritt from the Retro Revenge team on the final day as a 2 hour mini-jam!
play it now


Exterminator

Top-down shooter. YOU are the last exterminator on earth: are you MAN ENOUGH to eradicate the EVIL BUGS and save the last remnants of human kind from EXTINCTION?

play it now


Adaption

Environmental non-digital card game with unlimited play space, where players are fighting for evolutionary superiority by finding and claiming objects in the real world and attempting to stop opponents from doing so. Failure to manage that brings the player closer to extinction.

play it now


Happy Path

Art game. Travel along the Happy Path - an experiment in narrative/satirical game design through environment.

play it now


Decline

A real-time strategy game in which your characters can be lost forever and you must balance out when to use them in order to survive the onslaught.

play it now


To find out more about these games keep an eye out for our GGJ 2010 articles which will cover winners, non-digital games (team BOARD GAME), exclusive Open Source tools (from Neil Holmes, official game jammer and producer of Blitz 1UP) and solo teams (KoryWazHere & Lomax).

We had a great time jamming and hope to see you at the next one. If you took part in the Global Game Jam 2011, post a comment below with a link to your game. We’d love to check it out.

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Latest Comments

• I was at the game jam site in Newport, but had the IndieCity live stream on in the corner of my screen all weekend! Sorry PiD for harassing you on Twitter all the time about the stream crashing :P
  
  Our team worked on "Double Vision", a platform game based loosely on visual extinction, a neurological disorder which means you can't identify two things if presented with them both at the same time. Basically you can either see the enemies OR the platforms, but not both at the same time. Needless to say I'm rubbish at playing it. http://globalgamejam.org/2011/double-vision

  Posted by: davecheesefish on February 04, 2011 17:11 GMT

• Ha ha! Double Vision is AWESOME =D

  Posted by: kvandenberg on February 04, 2011 17:38 GMT

• Thanks! We were pretty pleased with it ourselves :)

  Posted by: davecheesefish on February 04, 2011 20:36 GMT

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