Great weekend. PegJam was the 2nd Winnipeg version of TigJam, which is where game devs from all over get together for weekend of coding madness. I believe the idea is to make a 48 hour game, but the whole thing is more about ideas than rules. There were some really really talented people around, and by demo time Sunday night it was pretty phenomenal what everyone had done. Really, it was like, wow! Huge thanks to Alec Holowka and everyone involved : ).

Sandy and I really wanted to test out the swf2xna framework in a real world deadline situation, and the 48 hour game seemed perfect. Sky and Free (my sons) helped a ton out too – in spite of missing almost a full day for their concert, they added (to the framework) shadows and highlight shaders, zoom/follow camera, and lots of physics goodness. Sandy made all the art from scratch in Flash. Most of the coding time was spent on components, but we managed to finish the main screens and three levels (the levels are very quick to make now though, as it is just placing assets in flash and testing). I was sort of keeping track of time, I figured Sandy and I spent roughly 16 hours on it, and Sky and Free 8 each. Lots of visiting was happening, which of course was the best part!

Note: swf2xna does box2d layout (in a similar way to the V2D layout engine for flash). It uses the super duper box2dXNA port, which is optimized for xbox – highly recommended!

Here is the game:

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