One of my first gamejams, placed in the Campus Party Valencia 2008, my second Lan Party that I assisted with my coleagues from Stratos-AD community in these days.
The Campus Party was divided y several areas of interest for the assistans, one of them was the DesarrolladorES (developers) area focused on meetings, activities and contests related with development, and there, was the GameDev area, focused on game development. In this area we had the 72h Quick Video Game Development Contest (before the world called these contests simply gamejams 😛). As difference for the usual gamejams this contest was not had a theme for the game, only topics to be implemented.
For this jam the topics was: water, puzzles and comic aesthetic. I decided to try to develop a game based on the classic Arkanoid with the extra mechanic of progressive increasing level of water, where the player pad floats, with the goal of complete the level before it was floded. This mechanic add the extra difficult of the shrink playable area.
For the graphics I used some art from my old projects and create new ones applying the Pixelate Color Halftone filter from Adobe Photoshop, to “imitate” the Pop Art style on solid colors, and designed a comic like page with vignettes to create the playable area and the score board side panel.
The game was developed in 2 days using .NET Framework 3.5 with C# and an experimental engine I worked on in 2008, TLSA Engine Renovatio, based in .NET Framework 3.5 too and on an early version of dx_lib32 2.2.0. For the levels I used Microsoft Paint as level editor to ease compose the levels using 12x12 pixels bitmaps that was processed by the game to compose the levels in screen.
The final state of the art, like the game code, is incomplete at the time to finish the gamejam. No menus, powerups, sounds effects or complete mechanics are implemented, only the required for the topics: the progressive flooding of the level each few seconds, the pad and ball logic, and the bricks, with color variants, with different score points each one, one with double hit to be destroyed, and one unbreakable.
