During Global Game Jam 2011, I was working on “The Ultimate Celebration” with Brian Soulliard, Devin Ford and Lane Lawley at Rochester Institute of Technology. At the same time an imaginary game was also being creating but at the Albany, New York site. From the ingenious minds of Dan Sternfeld and Ben Saxe came forward an interactive experience that used “destruction” as part of gameplay. This gave rise to the game Fade, a 2D puzzle platformer where the user “fade” objects in and out of the world in order to catch a mischievous diamond thief.
A couple weeks ago I was given the opportunity to work on Fade by assisting Dan and Ben with the artistic feeling of the game and the in game assets. The main goal was to make “Fade” as polish as possible since it will be submitted for student competition at the 14th annual Independent Game Festival. That deadline came today! It was an amazing journey seeing the visual evolution of the game. There is a dramatic change from the original visuals which can be seen here. The game level design has also been refined to also include animating text to assist the player through the first few levels. Another change was the move to the iPad. The touch screen made “fading” objects feel more natural than using a mouse button. Ben and Dan hopes to have this game released on the Apple App-store in the near future. I hope to be around to see that audacious occasion occur.
As we got closer to the deadline, I had to do some small sound generation. That sound that plays when you pick up that diamond was created by me! It is an interesting experience since I am usually a developer, designer and artist but never a sound designer. This felt really like working on a small indie team where it is crucial to have multiple skills
No worries! I also have not forgotten my original Game Jam game, The Ultimate Celebration. Brian Soulliard spent the entire summer and before the deadline polishing everything about the game. We even have original music created by Filippo Beck Peccoz who we met at Casual Connect Germany. That game as been submitted for the main competition and the student competition. I hope to see both games making it to the finals. I feel honored to be allowed to work on both games especially Fade. Dan and Ben are one of the most interesting game designers that I have met during my time here at RIT. It will be a sad day when we all graduate and move on to greater things. But I hope one day we can all come back together to create game that is more imaginative, fun and exciting.
Like the Fade facebook page! 😀
Memory Log 10-31-2011CE Recorded Complete.
Lawrence Jung 