Monday, February 21, 2011

Global Game Jam 2011 - I Love Kakapo

We have participated in the game development marathon this year where you have to create a computer game in 48 hours. It's a great success for me that we made it in time to a fun to play result. We used the XNA framework and created a simple 2D platformer with 3D graphics.
This year's topic was extinction and we got this great idea for a game:
It's about saving the Kakapo parrots from extinction. These lovely parrots which live in New Zealand have never had any natural predators and with evolution gradually degraded (lost their ability to fly, got fatter and so on...). One day a new predator was brought to the island where they live and nearly all of them were eradicated. Today there's only about 150 of them. What's more, when mating, the male sits somewhere in the forest and makes these deep sounds trying to attract a female. Sadly, because the frequency of the sound is so low, it's very hard to tell where is it coming from - therefore the female hardly ever finds him.

In our game you have to guide the female to her future partner. If you succeed you control the next generation of the kakapo in the next level which is slower and can't fly as well.

We didn't manage to implement everything we wanted in the game so we sat down a few days after the event and added some graphics, a better head's up display, 3D sound effects(yay!) and corrected some bugs to make the game complete.
A couple of screenshots here:





And here is a video of the final version.

You can download the one we managed to do in 48 hours here, on the Global Game Jam's website. And the updated version can be downloaded here.

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