TOJam is an annual 3 day indie game jam held in Toronto with the goal of creating a game in 3 days. I've got friends who attend every year and I had so much fun last year I had to return. Truly one of the highlights of the year for me.

On Friday April 23rd 2010, I packed up a laptop, some hardware and 2 changes of clothes and headed to the train station.

The Jam actually got underway at 10:00 am for early arrivals, but living outside of Toronto and being reliant on public transit meant not getting there until early afternoon. That's fine though, as early arrival was limited this year. I was set up and working by 3 pm.

Yep, there's that big towery thing again.

From Toronto's Union Station it was a short walk up Bay Street to King Street and then over a couple of blocks to Sherbourne. Convenient!

Bay street towers. People who like money work there and do stuff with money. I like money, but not that much.

Inside the Autodesk building, second floor. This is the place!
Ah, good ol' Em, Jim or Rob.

Video log #1

"It begins..."

I set up my laptop and gear quickly, then headed to the nearby market to load up on cola and vegetable samosas. I then settled in and began working on my game, Kairos Mend.

This year's Theme is "Missing", and as always interpret that as you will. For my game, you play as a Scientist with super-spring boots who's crashed his time machine and must retrieve all the missing parts.

About 8 pm or so Jim, Em and Rob gave the official welcome.

Keeping it short and keeping it real.

After the speeches and thank you for commings, thank you sponsors, it was back to work! I powered through until about 4:30 am, at which point I crashed out on the floor for about 2 hours of poor quality sleep.

I powered through Saturday and crashed again about the same time (4am-ish). Slept for about 3 hours. Got back up and worked until the end. Good times.

Video log #2

"Good times"

Kairos Mend definitely need some polishing before the TOJam Arcade, but you can try it out here: Kairos Mend

This year's Jam was an incredible experience, and I'd like to express my gratitude to the event organizers and sponsors.

Cheers!
-bignobody

I keep a text file open during the Jam where I mark the time and mention events. It's pretty much just intended for me, but I thought it might be fun to share this year. Just a warning, it might not make sense, might contain profanities and/or inanities. If you don't think you can handle that, just don't look.
Friday: 3pm: IT BEGINS! Have already set up and got my samosas and coke. OPen FlexDevelop start new project. Kairos Mend Here we go! 3:30- after one false start, have my basic project setup, flixel initialized and text on the screen. Time to step back and put a basic project plan together. 4:08 - Invalid Bitmap Data trying to get my scientist sprite in game. Didn't run into this issue in my tests :( 4:28 - Seems Flixel shits on itself with bitmaps wider than 1408... Guess that complicates my animations some... 5:00 - Scientist animations in place 5:30 - Neanderthal animations in place. Getting ready for a break. 5:50: Break over. Time for tunes (Start with The Streets) Next Up: Build The Machine! 6:45: machine pieces load up. Now to do all the tedious piece offsets 7:30 - Matt visit over. back to offsets 7:48 - Machine assembled. Time to fire up Ogmo - hope it will do what I think it will. 9:00 - building Ogmo project file, starting tilesets. Preps victim to size limit 9:38: Victim of Ogmo size limitations. Editor chokes on 4096 x 4096 map size :( Either have to scale back level idea, or perhaps build in sections ... 10:00. Damn you, Ogmo. Damn you. 10:28: building tilemaps by hand. Already more progress than with Ogmo. Tiles are too big - disproportionate to characters. 11:05: back from break. Tiles tiles tiles... Better Look into how we're colliding these bad boys before we get too far in 11:30 Have Player on Tile collsion and very basic movement! Flixel Rocks! 11:35 I love you flixel. 12:00 Still trying to fix my scaled down tiles 12:13 Getting midground tiles in place 12:21 Now have Parallaxing midground. Oh Flixel, you so crazeh! 12:50 Break over. Considering best way of map making... Make flixel tile editor? 12:53 It's decided. Investment of a few hours into a map editor will make all the diff. Will build it into the game 1:20 Messing me up with you voodoo! 1:24 Have Edit state with background and foreground tiles, movable cursor. 2:00 Editor is partially functional for foreground. "Go It Alone!" 2:40 Finished my 2L of Coke and have now eaten 6 vegetable samosas. Need to add midground and background support to editor 3:40 Struggling to get editor functional enough. Will be time for sleepies soon. 4:00 Background tile placement is wonky. Time for sleep. Alarm set for 8:00 7:10 Back up. Sort of slept, but not well. Time for breakfast 7:40 It's Saturday and it's time to get serious, bitches! 8:04 Larger editor curor is always displaced from tile index :( 8:10 It was the scrollfactor, you idiot! 9:07 - working on first test map. Tiles still need cleanup - 4294967295 9:30 - looks like we'll need a seperate tilemap for the cave background 10:00 - editor now supports 3 levels. Need to clean up collision tiles and start level creation. 11:09 - have collision tiles mostly cleaned up 12:00 - Level creation is taking time. Adding new functionality to level editor 12:40 - back from break. Got cleaned up and changed clothes. 1:15 - Background tiles are satisfactory for now. Gotta get the level made! 1:51 - Leaving level creation for now. Going to get machine and parts spread across level. Going to need to do movement/animation logic for scientist soon too. 2:23 - Level pieces scattered across the level. Time machine seems to be shaking itself into the ground though. Taking a break, eating a bagel, going to buy more coke. Going to get the Scientist movement animations in place on return in preparation of pickup/carry. 2:56 - Time to link movement with animation! This will be fun! 3:42 - Fixed machine piece jitter. movement based animations roughed in, but it seems we've lost the ability to jump. somehow... Roughed in Carry needs. 4:13 - FUCK! One of my source files seems to be corrupted. 4:15 - Nope, just an extra } 4:41 - break over. Time to find out why Flixel is getting a null pointer exception when I'm trying to hook into animation callbacks 5:22 - still fighting with getting the walking moving properly 6:30 - Dinner and break done. Still tinkering with player movement instead of heading to pickup milestone... FOCUS! 6:45 - Delighted with unexpected physics side effects. Flixel, you continue to surprise and delight. 7:03 - Carry that shit. 7:37 - carrying working nicely. Had to remove the machine piece from the collision group as the player was constantly colliding with it :D 7:41 - next milestone is to repair the ship with the carried piece! 8:11 - repair is rough, but working! 8:52 - Time for a break. Need to decide on the next milestones. Need to finish the map, add the Neanderthals+AI, spread the parts properly, add win condition... 9:30 - Break over, sweatpants on. We're here to make a game, so a game we shall make! Collecting all the pieces triggers the win condition. 10:16 - You can win the game now :) 10:28 - have decided that next, the Neanderthals shall once more walk the earth. 10:47 - HELP! BEING CHASED BY NEANDERTHALS! 11:24 - Making Neanderthal Emotions 11:33 - Making Neanderthal brain 11:42 - Favourite function name so far DecideHowIFeelRightNow :D 12:28 - Basic emotion switching and behaviour alteration. Still needs fleshing out. Working on Neanderthal part pickup 12:58 - 1 am beers? Oh, you silly drunken monkey. 1:36 - Back to work after break and cleanup. Settling on for the haul before crash. 1:55 - Is another beer a good idea? probably not. Is it necessary? Definitely yes. 1:59 - for some reason when Neanderthals pick up pieces, they don't stick - they go floating off to the left. 2:05 - solved by zeroing piece velocity when picked up. Seems they just stop after picking up a piece. Going to add player jump and knockout, then the gun! 3:25 - Can jump and knock out neanderthals. Also playing with player movement feel. Better since I increased the speed cap, but still somewhat unweildly. Pretty tired. Going to finish the last of this 2L of coke and see if I can get a start on projectiles. Feel a crash coming on soon. 4:12 - Bullets are shooting. THings are still wonky with it though. Also no cap on bullets (crash after too many) 4:24 - I'm catching the last train to Morningtown. See you on the other side for the wrap! 7:35 - Oh hell... Am I still here? 8:18 - Had breakfast, change of clothes and freshened up. Grabbing my attitude adjuster - less than 12 hours left! I came to Jam! 8:52 - Making the bullets deadly 9:53 - Back with 3rd 2L of coke for the Jam and another 4 Vegetable Samosas. 10:00 - Time for sounds! 10:30 - apparently I can't embed wav files, and I don't have the ability to convert to mp3 :( 11:00 - Drunken Monkey to the rescue - he had the WinLame Audacity plugin. Shooting now has sound effects! 11:49 - springy sound effects in place. Embedding and queuing all these sounds is a little tedious 1:01 - Going to try to make the proper level. Have run into issue with must having a blank first tile...Might need to hit up the tiles again... 2:15 - simple level to fix some collision issues. Also more player movement tweaks. Still have to implement player damage and HUD. 2:38 - break over. Let's get that HUD in place 3:01 - Basic hud in place. Went back to the bounciest player controls. Feels the most fun, and will allow for more interesting level design. 3:20 - Ammo and pieces info hooked into HUD. 3:48 - working on getting a reasonable level in place. Computer hanging frequently. 4:30 - Hey, a lot can still happen in Three and a half hours! 5:43 - think I have my level planned out. Need to test it! 5:53 - test failed :( Parallax holes need to be fixed. Also, player is too small in comparison. Hard to navigate 6:54 - Enabled wall jumping so the level is navicable (barely!) Entering the final hour. Need to get final placements for enemies, machine parts in, plus menu screen and congratulations screen 7:35 - A few ugly problems that I'd rather not have at this point, but it's time to slap on a titlescreen and game over screen 8:00 - Jam is over! Lots of ugly game problems, but very proud of what I accomplished in the time. Got those two extra screens crammed in just in time :)