These miniature videogame marvels sprang from the frantic minds of developers during last week's Global Game Jam.
The international exercise in lightning-fast game design challenged creative types to crank out fully functional (and fully fun) videogames in just one weekend.
These screenshots show some of the titles cooked up, from a text-based zombie massacre to a Wikipedia-based puzzle game. For more on the Global Game Jam, read Clive Thompson's column on the subject.
Left: Lucid was one of the most polished games of the New York Game Jam because the team was large and diverse — game designers, programmers, music wranglers and an excellent artist who drew all the visuals by hand. The game literally looks like a pencil-and-watercolor picture.
Another reason the Lucid team got its game done on time and in polished format: They kept the gameplay supersimple. It's basically just a side-scroller flipped on its end — collecting goodies as your player floats slowly upward.:
Since they nailed the gameplay concept early, the Lucid team had lots of time to work on other stuff — like designing the obstacles and putting the colored blocks in hard-to-reach areas. The control scheme is nicely balanced: You have good but not perfect control, making an otherwise too-easy game quite challenging.:
Wiki Paths was an ingenious idea: The game gives you two randomly chosen Wikipedia pages and you have five minutes to navigate from one to another, by surfing links the connect pages. Everyone knows what it's like to surf idly through Wikipedia: This turns that common experience into an uncommon game.
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