Following the success of the previous Boston GameJam that dealt with the thorny issue of immigration, this weekend saw another gathering of creative minds at MIT-Gambit for LunarJam.
Keen to go beyond the final frontier, the developers were keen to prove that they had the Right Stuff and produce a playable demo of a game with a lunar theme by 5PM on Sunday night. Fortified by pizza, hummus, guacamole and Red Bull, the game-onauts were sorted in teams and readied themselves for launch. As ever, from a seemingly vast panorama of moon-based options, the developers were able to come up with 5 different styles of game whose titles and game-play were deceptively simple but hid the complex work that had gone into them.
Moon Shot was a multi-level game that utilized the gravitational pull of a celestial body to slingshot a ship onto the next destination whilst Rock Shock & 2 Smoking Planets was “an unbalanced rock-slinging game” that promised an Earth vs Moon showdown using cheese and space-pigs. Perchance to Dream was a lavishly illustrated Choose-Your-Adventure scenario that inevitably revealed one of the characters to be an android, whereas Radio Moonbase was an aural lunar soundscape that required a delicate touch and the desire to bring order out of chaos. Finally, there was a classic side-scroller in the shape of Moon Lander Cheese Grabber which saw the gamer negotiating a random generated landscape whilst attempting to gather different strengths of cheese and destroy indigenous aliens.
The quality of the games on display this weekend was beyond doubt, still more remarkable given the time frame and the subject matter. Boston GameJams have a reputation for producing games that will be able to be taken to the next level and this writer is hoping that at least one of these games will make it onto an app store (iPhone or Android). Before that happens though, they will be presented at the Moon Ball – part of the 2010 International Moon Capital Design Competition – and once they have gone through some additional polishing will ensure that they are not confined to the dark side of game development.
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