Game: Birds In Space

Teammates: Ryan Hoffman, Rob Cook, Ed Meacham, Drew Walker
Tools: XNA – C#
Project length: 48 Hours (Finished 06/06/10)

On June 4-6, 2010, I attended TIGJam Midwest, a weekend-long indie game jam in Des Moines, Iowa. While there, I teamed up with Ryan Hoffman, Rob Cook, Ed Meacham and Drew Walker. Ryan and I did the programming, Rob worked on the art, and Ed and Drew created all of the audio.

For this game jam, the teams were tasked with creating a game based off of a proverb. Our team decided to do “the early bird gets the worm”. So, for our splitscreen multiplayer game, you play as a bird, and you are racing against the other players to get as many worms as fast as possible. Oh, your bird also is in space and has a jetpack. Good luck making sharp turns in the near-frictionless environment.

The game was developed using XNA, and uses some of the utilities provided at creators.xna.com. This was the first time Ryan and I had ever done a 3D game, so we learned a lot about the intricacies and challenges of rendering models in a 3D environment. The actual game development time lasted from 11PM Friday (conceptualization) to 3PM Sunday (final build), for a total time of 40 hours.

If you would like to check out the game, you can download the project below. Players (up to 4) can use an Xbox 360 controller to play, or the keyboard can be used as a master control for all for players at once. Please note that, because this game was written in a weekend, it may contain some bugs. Thanks for checking this out, and please let me know what you think!

Download the game!

Object of the game: Race to collect all of the worms that are floating around the level.

Controls:
Keyboard: Space to accelerate, B to brake, left/right to turn
Xbox 360 controller: right trigger to accelerate, left trigger to brake, left joystick to turn.