Development Process

The development process took place in hanging meeting rooms around the central atrium. Most of the groups focused on a very quick concept development and started working right away. Some of the concepts resulted in some very unusual tasks.

A good example would be the audio designers of Dark Room XX. The game takes place in a dark room in a sex club and doesn't have any graphics. The player has to use sound (in lieu of tactile sensation) to navigate the room and find a partner, with which he/she has to use the audio to find the right rhythm in their interaction.

The audio was a rather important part of the concept, so the audio designers ended up using more than 20 hours surfing erotic movies to find the right sound bites. They looked pretty haggard in the end.

Going gold(-ish)

The teams were expected to hand in their game demos on Sunday at 15:00 sharp. Deadlines being what they are, and developers being what they are, the deadline was extended a bit.

Still, a surprisingly large number of the groups were ready at 15:00... although not without issues. For instance, the Social in an Elevator group had a functional prototype with all the relevant features up 'n running until -- two hours before the deadline--– they merged their code and lost approximately half their features. Unable to reverse to an earlier version, they spent the last two hours trimming their remaining features to minimize the loss and handed in a polished, but feature-reduced version of their game.

After the hand-in, the participants had 2 hours before presentations to rest, recover and peruse games from the other groups. At the same time the jury was lead from group to group to have the games presented to them. All of the participants gathered in the auditorium and took turns in presenting their games.

The presentations were interrupted with quick dinner; after the final presentations, the jury withdrew to deliberate. Meanwhile the participants voted for the Participants Award.

Nineteen games had been made and this meant that each group only had around 15 minutes to present their game. Some of the presentations made a impression, especially the aforementioned Dark Room XX, where six people stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the same keyboard trying to match each other's rhythms according to the moaning and without any graphics to support it. It was quite... evocative.