For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a game with Josh Textor and Marivan Ebrahimi titled Snöfyr. A game where children fall off a cliff, become a snowball, abosrorb random stuff, and then crash into a lighthouse.

Yesterday evening our Studio 1 class had the opportunity to exhibit our work in progress alongside some of the Studio 2 and 3 classes. This involved some games industry people from Brisbane coming in and taking a look at our works.

Having had previously shown my games within a public sphere before, I knew what to expect: Directing people who didn’t know how to play (then mentally noting how to improve that communication in the game), explaining the thought processes behind certain design decisions, and answering any questions they have about the game.

Although I couldn’t stay the entire event, I still had the opportunity to chat with a few people. What was great to hear was that people really enjoyed the control and feel of controlling the ball and picking stuff up, as well as hitting the lighthouse at the bottom. Almost everyone noticed the Katamari Damacy inspiration, and got the quirks we were trying to make with this inspiration.

The rest of the night was chatting with the other students about their games, asking about the choices they made within their games.

My favourite game of the night was Chickuzi (recently greenlit on steam) a game about a chicken trying to save Easter by killing all the bunny rabbits. In the 5 minutes I played I was very impressed by the level design, controls and the feel of blowing the fuck out of a city with a rocket launcher. The most interesting aspect I found in the game was that the levels were made of voxels (essentially pixels in 3d space). These voxel levels were first made in minecraft, and then exported as data for the game to read. This does mean that it takes a long time to load the level, but it does mean that destroying buildings looks fantastic and ridiculous.

All in all an enjoyable night