I, Rosemary, was late to this session because I got the plague, and much of the meeting is a blur, so blame any inaccuracies of reporting on the viruses playing a real-time strategy game with my immune system (and pwning it).

We started this week by demolishing some tasty snacks and talking about our homework.

The first part of this week’s assignment required us to refine our Scratch games from the previous session. Some of us had made some neat improvements to our games, but the clear winner of the revision challenge was Peter. His game from last week, “Mouse Police”, featured a cat eating some mice with plenty of realistic sounds and gore. For his revision, he broke the cat down into several chunks to make the movements more realistic, and added an effect that made the cat get fatter and fatter with every vicious attack.

For the next part of the assignment we had to pick one of a handful of free game-making programs, import some graphics and other elements, and get one interaction working.

Patricio chose Greenfoot. Greenfoot is a specially made Java development environment that’s mostly designed for teaching programming (thanks, Wikipedia!). Patricio’s game was about ants at a picnic. You played as a worker ant, and your task was to lead your ant friends towards food without crossing paths and making things confusing. We talked about where the game could go from here — whether to include things like pheromones or threats. It reminded me of SimAnt, which was one of my favourite games as a kid (mostly because the “random” button occasionally made the spider shoot lasers).

Peter chose to use Game Maker. His game involved an asteroid hurtling towards the viewer, and a very convincing and pretty Battlestar-Galactica-style tracking grid. People tossed around some ideas about where to go from here, including whether Peter should focus on an expansion of his mouse/cat universe. By this point I felt pretty dizzy from the plague, and I can’t remember whether we really did discuss cat and mouse armies bringing their eternal struggle to outer space.

Then it was my turn. I decided to use Game Maker, too. I made the start of the albatross game I had been talking about making during the first session. So far the albatross moved over the ocean, and some improbable palm islands drifted past in the Antarctic sea below. We talked about how I could handle the challenge of building a convincing, long game map for the albatross to fly over.

Jim picked Adventure Game Studio. He presented an early version of “Baby Runs this Mofo,” his disturbingly realistic vision of flailing babies disrupting the very fabric of reality. He used actual photographs to simulate changes made in an ordinary living room by the baby protagonist – the baby touches a toy and a lamp across the room turns on, for example. Humanity can only cower in fear as each Artsy Games Incubator session reveals a strengthening of Jim’s baby’s horrible power.

Susan’s presentation began the way every presentation should, with delicious cupcakes. In keeping with Susan, these were Science Cupcakes, with melted chocolate somehow baked into the middle. We ate these improbable yet delicious cupcakes while she showed us her game (also a Game Maker creation). In this game you are a cupcake, and you bounce against various cookies, changing them into other desert items. This mechanic suggested some unique and interesting future gameplay. We talked about whether the final game should play like the old board game Mastermind(tm), which would see the player trying to bump the treats until the correct configuration was attained.

Finally, we talked about the new homework, which is to create three “levels” of the games we had started to build.

Then it was time to discuss more of our favourite indie games. Jim showed off Aquaria, a beautiful prize-winning underwater game with lovely art that reminded me of the PS2 game Odin Sphere. Jim and Patricio talked about the old favourite Samorost. I showed a video of the gorgeous, puzzling game by Q-Games called PixelJunk Eden.

Then, humbled by the independent games brilliance yet fortified by cupcakes, we headed back out into the frozen wastes of Toronto, some of us more steadily than others.