Bang! 7 Day FPS Game Jam Now On
FPS experiments and fun
The first Seven Day First-Person Shooter Challenge in 2012 brought us games including Receiver, an obsession with the clicky mechanical bits of guns that made me realise that, required to use a pistol, I probably would just leave a trail of accidentally-ejected magazines. One of the game jam's stars in 2013 was Superhot, a stylish dance of positioning and movement. Interesting things can happen when folks dedicate a week to focusing on an unusual idea in a small shooty-bang game. This year's 7DFPS kicked off on Saturday and things are in full swing. Already I've seen one of the most wonderful and horrible parody FPSs ever. Look at this terrible thing:
GAME OF THE YEAR: YOLO420BLASTA vs xxXilluminatiXxx [wow/10 #rekt edition], to use what I believe is its full name, is an FPS inspired by overblown frag montage videos. The more men you shoot, the more it blasts captions, animated gifs, soundclips, and memes. It's the work of Andy Sum, who I believe can't be entirely awful as he worked on Dungeon Dashers. This video was his progress on Saturday alone. It's only one of the many interesting things going on in the game jam.
I am admiring this train and forest. I don't know what's going on with these low-fi monkeys. I dig this concept art. This is a load of weapons. I am keen to see more of this "cyberpunk samurai nightclub game". I'm big on the idea of this 7DFPS sniper game, crossing over with the Procedural Generation Jam also going on, "about protecting a client by deducing which one AI is a threat, by watching little AI stories happen". Firing a cannon sounds complicated. "Right now it's kind of Proteus with guns..." says the maker of this prototype.
Game jams going by genre can throw up some pretty interesting results, as folks who've never made an FPS before often join in and bring interesting new ideas with them. Some people will make a conventional FPS in their time, of course, and those can be plenty fun too. Either way, it's interesting to see and follow. You can read dev blog posts, gawp at the #7DFPS hashtag, and already play a few submitted games.
Here's this year's keynote, with thoughts and advice from some fine folks what make games:
[That photo of a bang-bang is by 'Rama', used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.]
