The World of Love conference. It threatened to draw an unprecedented horde of independent game developers to our nation’s noble capital, where they would surely be compelled to blurt scandalising ideas out of their disordered brains, to binge-drink, and to forever infuse ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ with apocalyptic portent. Such a volatile situation required delicate handling – as anyone who has seen the shameful aftermath of a TED conference can attest.

As luck would have it, celebrated indie scene-boffins Terry Cavanagh (DistractionWare) and Ricky Haggett (Honeyslug) were seeking to organise a weekend Game Jam around the same time. This event would act as a lightning rod, diverting the indies’ attention to their second-favourite pastime of making games. (Although regretably, a group of unrepentant maniacs had to be released into Kensington Gardens.)

The World of Love Game Jam was held at Honeyslug’s offices in Kentish Town on Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th June 2010. It comprised of four three-hour jam sessions, and a proportionate amount of time in pubs and restaurants. Over the course of the weekend it is estimated that around 35 games aficionados made an appearance, from backgrounds as diverse as MMOs, social games, journalism, console development and academia.

The suggested themes of the sessions were:

1. Facebook, Traps

2. Vegetables, Hugs

3. Light and Shade, Water Water Everywhere, The Blob

4. The Jury, Reunion, Drifting

The results (that were deemed fit for public consumption) can be found at the Cambridge Friendship Club site: http://cambridgeindies.com/events/jam-world-love

A woefully incomplete list of attendees can be found here: http://lovejam.eventbrite.com/

My impression of the event (compared to the grand total of one game jam that I’d attended previously) was that it was remarkably quiet and intensive. While there was some collaboration going on, the majority were content to tinker on their own projects until (and beyond) the end of the allotted time before casually demonstrating them to the group.

As I spent most of my time squinting at Deluxepaint and inelegantly hacking at Python, I am sure I missed a lot of people’s stuff entirely, but out of things going on at my end of the room/things drawing the biggest crowds/things with the loudest sound effects, standouts were Terry’s Vegetable Game, Kieron’s VVVVVVegetable, Perrin and Terry’s Blind Faith, Alice’s VIDEO GAME, and Alan Hazelden’s blood-soaked tentacle-vs.-submarine game. The best game that I only found on the website afterwards ribbon goes to Don’t Eat Kittens. There were loads and loads more.

But as well as games, friendships were made, plans were hatched and fun was had (and other cliches). There are going to be more London-based game jams. Oh yes.

I’ve been pulling in a large number of bitmaps into flash recently (in fact importing them from Photoshop psds). I’m scaling the objects in my game, so I need to set the properties of each bitmap to ‘allow smoothing’, so they anti-alias as they scale (i.e. they scale smoothly rather than going all pixellated).

Quite unhelpfully, the Flash GUI doesn’t allow the Properties of multiple library objects to be set at once. And even more unhelpfully, it defaults all Bitmap Properties to ‘don’t allow smoothing’. This means I would have spent the whole of friday afternoon going left click.. right click.. left click.. left click.. left click.. grind teeth.. repeat..

.. if it wasn’t for this lovely Extension which allows you to select a folder, and recursively set the properties of all bitmaps below it with just a couple of clicks.

So thanks Devon O. Wolfgang! You just saved me HOURS of toil!

Okay, your normal exciting game development news service may resume…

/shuffles off..

So I finally got around to porting my particle engine to Actionscript 3 last week. You can see a little test swf here.

What I particularly like about my engine is that it allows behaviours to be defined in XML. Which means the code stays nice and clean (you just create an emitter, give it an XML file and start it up), but more importantly that a non-programmer can tweak particle effects to their heart’s content.

To give you an idea, here is the XML for the emitters in my test – both the one attached to the mouse pointer, and the one when you click.