factual opinions

Segregation is a mouse driven arcade game about trying to keep nuns and muslim women apart before they get into a fight.

Basically the player must quickly decide how to best move the groups of units to their separate areas, and if a fight breaks out the game is over. It’s your job to segregate the two groups to prevent senseless violence, but just how many followers of each faith can you save?

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Download + SVN access

Download the Windows binaries here. Unzip and run segregation.bat to play.

Download the source and binaries here.

Or get the source straight from our SVN repository.

You can see the entire project at Assembla, there’s even a design document for those interested.

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Screenshots

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Team

Carina Randlov, Stefano Manco & Mikkel Nielsen as artists

Hans-Henrik Jensen, Emil Kastbjerg, Kristian Kjems & Mikael Garde as programmers

Jon Lauridsen as producer-ish/coordinator

Dino Patti as entertainer and last-minute compiler-support

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About NGJ08

Nordic Game Jam ‘08 is a yearly event organized by IGDA, and takes place at at ITU in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is an event where participants form groups of three to ten people and go create games over a single weekend. Over a hundred people participated this year, the largest yet, and it was a wild mix of students, designers, programmers, randomly interested people, and everything in between!

This year’s theme was “Taboo”, which prompted a lot of very unique and extreme ideas.

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Diary

Going in Friday we vaguely knew what sort of project we wanted to make. Something simple, with focus on gameplay over flashy effects or techniques, top-down 2D gameplay, and many small units. And explicitly no multiplayer or physics. During the evening as our group discussed the design we ended up with the idea of the player manipulating units by drawing a path with the mouse. We also had more sophisticated ideas, in how the units would behave and things like powerups, but once you’ve read through this diary you’ll understand why all that was cut.

Only a few hours of that Friday was made available for work though, and we spent it all on design and prototyping. It was already midnight when we were ready to begin, so we agreed to meet up the next morning to start actual production.

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After breakfast it was time to be productive! Sort of. Three hours ended up passing before all the various pieces of software were installed and working. By now we only had about 15 hours of effective development time left, so the clock was definitely ticking. We got to work, and emerged five hours later with this: the first glimpse of the line-drawing mechanic. Then we went to eat dinner.

Six hours later and it was once again midnight, and so time for us to go sleep. But we were really feeling the pressure now, there were only five hours remaining the next day and we didn’t actually have a game at this point! Any resemblance of gameplay just hadn’t materialized. At this point the line drawing was buggy, the art proved difficult to massage into a coherent whole, and the game felt confusing and broken at best. It was a trying time for our little group… We went home just barely cautiously optimistic, knowing that we had to pull quite a stunt the next day to get something done.

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And what a stunt indeed! Sunday morning after little over an hour of production we had a game, it was just an unbelievable transformation from the night before. A couple important bugs had been ironed out, the graphics had taken on a coherent look, sound was implemented in all the right areas and made a huge difference, and the core gameplay emerged amidst it all. It was rough, it wasn’t entirely fun yet, but there was clearly something there with potential. The next several hours was spent trying to effectively communicate the objective to the player, we wanted something immediately understandable and playable. We also put in features such as scoring and resetting after dying, having been too busy up until that point to bother with such practical details.

It was at the last possible minute we decided to make the units flash red as they become aggressive, which turned out to make a huge difference in the player’s understanding of the gameplay.
We ended up pretty tight for time, even as the judges played our game we managed to fix a nasty crash-bug and tweak the gameplay to fix some important frustrations. Busy times…

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Post-mortem

The bad: We went in naively thinking we had 48 hours to code, but it turned out to be more like 16 hours! Next time we’ll adjust our ambitions accordingly, and also make sure not to waste so many hours installing software and getting things going. Maybe bring the software on USB keys ready for installation?

Furthermore we had decided on an unfamiliar programming-language, Python, and it turned out to be more trouble than anticipated. We might use it again since we at least know it by now, but we should have learned a bit about it before the contest though.

And finally our group was just slightly too large. It was mad fun having four programmers when other teams struggled getting just one, and two entire artists for a what could’ve been handled by one. Fun, but not entirely practical

The good: We went in with a simple plan, not gorging on features saved the day. We were approached several times about the possible inclusion of multiplayer or different game modes, but by not doing that we ended up with sufficient time to make the game fun.

We also did some very early paper-prototyping. We just cut out pieces of paper and laid them on a table and pretended to play. This got everyone on board from the start, and weeded out some ugly design-issues we hadn’t quite thought through.

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Once we had turned the project in we were all just happy to have taken part of Nordic Game Jam. It was an interesting and intense experience, and none of us could wait for next year. So we were pretty happy already, but it got all the more sweeter later that evening when we went on to win win the audience vote for best game! Hooray!