We created a game in 4 hours. That was the challenge of the ZHdK NewsGames Hackathon of the 6th of May.  NewsGames are a special genre between Serious Games and Traditionnal Video-Games, about news, events or political situations (Papers Please can be considered a News Game).

We decided to create a game about immigration, with a very macabre concept. The player tries to rescue Africans refugees who are drowning. At the end of the game, a newspaper indicates how many people died.

I really like the adrenalin of those types of challenges, so it was a nice afternoon doing “Fresh Off The Boat”. You can play it here for Windows 64bits: <a href=”/games/FreshOffTheBoat.zip</a>

Links:

http://gamedesign.zhdk.ch/de/news/zhdk-game-design-der-zdok-2015

http://zhdkngh.tumblr.com/

https://vine.co/tags/zhdkngh

Last week-end, I made Super Splash Fistiguffs for the Ludum dare 32. Our team was composed with Kevin Peclet, a very talented artist that I met at the Swiss French Game Developer Meetup. He works on Starfallen, an exploration Rogue-lite. Hamza "Tenchi" Haiken made the music.

Kevin and I took the train on Saturday morning for Basel. A location was organized in the Oslo Spielhalle. We brainstormed the idea in the 2hours of the trip. Kevin wanted to test something new, so he proposed a local multi-player game in the spirit of Towerfall. We wanted something not too serious, so there would have cats. What does cat hate? Water. So, water gun it was. Now, let's go on the Post-Mortem:

For the International Workshop in Hong Kong, I chose to pass the week with the Honk Kong students of the HKDI (The Design Institute). The result of this workshop was a performance where students from Zürich and Hong Kong lived together in a village. We were 9 students, 4 from Zürich and 5 from Hong Kong.

I went in Hong Kong for an International Workshop. With Keng, a design colleage, we took the plane on Wednesday from Zürich to Moscow, Moscow to Bangkok, Bangkok to Hong Kong. There were 50 minutes transit time in Moscow, that's why we didn't go directly from Moscow to Hong Kong. Thanks Obama!

Today, we visited a little village high in the mountains (500 meters, so no comparaison to Swiss mountains) around Hong Kong as part of the Low-Density theme of the day. We met an old lady whose passion is to draw flowers everywhere. She call herself the Flower Granny (or Lady, when she was younger).

Today, in the Research Workshop, we had to finish our master project O_O

So I took the opportunity to play with the concept of my master project and create Faith 0.1, a first version of the game I am trying to achieve.

You can play it here.

It’s Windows 64 only. WASD to move & jump.

Don’t hesitate to record you playing, I like feedback.

The best conference I followed in the last two years" said Stefano Vanotti, the Research Workshop responsible. That is the feedback we received for the conference we organized. The conference can be described with this image:

During 3 days, I was in the Devonshire with 11 friends of mine. We had a beautiful home in Halberton.

For the ETH course "Game Programming", we were in an arcade pinball bar. The ETH course is a cooperation from ZHdK and ETH with support of Disney Research Project. The goal of the course is to create a game in a semester. The theme of the game should be link to "evolution". I will talk more about my experience about this course in an other post.