I tried to tell a joke, and all I got was a t-shirt.

Atlanta's new game developer convention, SIEGE, was this weekend. I didn't speak like last year, but I went to some surprisingly good panels. Conference panels are a hit or miss affair - good panels are often developers talking about specifics of their day-to-day creative work ("Audio roundtable", "Concept art"). The worst tend to be people who are not working developers discussing how they think things should be ("Are Games Art?", "Interactive Games as Social Media"). Those panels just make me think, as medieval Squidward says, "Everyone be-eth a critic." Anyway, it's always good to go to conferences just to meet people, and it's cool that Atlanta has a conference at all.

So, back to my joke. Last year, the convention had an art contest based on a prompt, and nobody entered. This year, the contest was to develop an entire working game based on a prompt. Now, way fewer people can make a working game than can draw a picture (no offense, artists, I'm not talking about doing it well, just doing it at all.) Furthermore, the contest was announced Friday. So I figure it's 80% certain no one is entering. The joke would be to bang out a bad but working flash game Saturday night, walk in Sunday, collect the prize T-shirt and everyone would have a good laugh. Worst case, somebody like me has the same idea, and I get to know a like-minded programmer.

I spent five hours Saturday night, and another five Sunday morning banging out a sort of a game based on the prompt "The Lab Experiment Goes Awry." Here's the game, such as it is:

http://www.brainminute.com/LHC/LHCLoader.swf


Well, long story short, it fell flat.

First: Yes, I was the only person to make a game. But I was not counting on two teams of bleary-eyed students who had worked for 72 hours straight, both trying build some kind of Unreal 3 level. Neither had much to show for it, and were still feverishly typing. Well, I couldn't exactly say "I should win no matter how bad my game is because I'm the only person here with an actual game as opposed to one fourth of an Unreal level still in the editor", so I was kind of stuck. Don't get me wrong, what they had represented a lot of good effort. It's just that it didn't work with my vision of breezily walking in and having the only entry. Have you ever gone to a local Magic (the card game) tournament and it's all kids? And then you either win and feel like a jerk, or worse, you lose and feel like a doofus? It was kind of like that.

Second, there weren't any judges. People just wandered by during a break in the wrap-up meeting, so I had to stand there like it was my eighth grade science project (second place in the county, 1986, thanks).

Third, my laptop sucks, and the contest was moved up an hour, so I didn't have time to beg one off a friend, so the framerate was bad. Nothing turns cute into stupid faster than a bad framerate.

So the joke was doomed from the outset, but that's ok, because the game didn't come together like I'd hoped, anyway. What's funny is that I could have told me why it wasn't going to come together before I even started, because I know: "Don't try to do two new things with no time." The most rookie of rookie errors. Indeed, I was counting on the fact that all programmers who are capable of finishing a game in a day also know that a day isn't enough time to finish a game, if you follow me. But instead I fell into my own trap. Why did I do that? I dunno.


The two new things:

First, I was trying for some dark humor by observing that if the Large Hadron Collider were to create a black hole, the implications are so bad, that it strains normal ethics to the edge of absurdity. But getting anything more complicated than "get the bad guy" across in a game is new to me, and requires finesse, timing -- and time.

Second, I tried a new control system. It's kind of a Tempest-plus thing where the controls move you clockwise and counter clockwise, and you shoot into the middle. But in ten hours I was barely able to get the math right, much less add the kind of rework, polish, feedback, and coherent instructions required for that to work.


Oh, well. It was fun, and has a few good ideas, and I'm kind of proud of it in a way. My Flash skills are very raw, and it was nice to just plow through something, avoiding all the things I don't know how to do, and heedlessly trampling good programming practices. It's not often my typing speed gets to be the gating factor to my productivity.

Oh, one more thing. The "LHC Rap" is totally awesome. Using it in the game, I'm risking a James Agee - Walker Evans kind of thing. You know, when you read "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", and you might have thought it was OK, but Walker Evans' photos in the middle are so much better that they cross media and genre and make you realize the book itself is kind of stupid.