OLPC Physics Game Jam For an XO

Brian Jordan writes "For 48 hours during the weekend of August 29-31 at the OLPC Physics Game Jam Boston, game developers will compete in teams of 2-4 to design and implement a physics-based game for the One Laptop per Child XO laptop. There are prize categories for indie, professional, and remote developers (Ludum Dare style). In addition to OLPC/Jam-related swag for all participants, one team will win an XO laptop. Participants should have some game development experience, but we'll be going over the development process during the event — read below for details. If you'll be in the Boston area this weekend, or want to participate remotely, sign up before August 22. If you're a graphic artist, sound designer, musician in the Boston area, or want to be a volunteer, get in touch." Click the magic link for details of the crash course in game programming being offered.

Eric Jordan of the Box2D project will be giving a talk on developing physics games with pyBox2D for the OLPC XO. Nirav Patel, the Google Summer of Code student working on vision processing for the XO, will describe combining physics and vision processing for interactive games. And Alex Levenson, OLPC summer intern and creator of the x2o physics game, will give a remote introduction to level design for his game.

one team will win an XO laptop

one team will win an XO laptop

So it's One Laptop Per Child, but Only One Laptop for an entire development team. Hardly seems right.

Re:

A net prize worth $200 is hardly worth a trip into Boston...

Re:one team will win an XO laptop

You are not the kind of person they are looking for.

OLPC is a non-profit organization. They seek people that have similar things in mind.

Re:one team will win an XO laptop

Especially when you consider that the Boston police are likely to shoot you if they catch you carrying it. After all, it has blinking lights on it and it certainly doesn't look like a NORMAL laptop... ;-)

Re:one team will win an XO laptop

A prize of $20,000 wouldn't tempt me to go to Boston.

$200,000...maybe. Depends how long I have to stay.

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I felt the same way until I saw a Knights of the Old Republic tabletop game ad here on slashdot just now. It immediately inspired me to go to Boston and create a whack-a-mole style game that alternates between the heads of JarJar and George Lucas. These kids need an educational game to teach them about who ruined star wars and what they should do about it.

That's nothing

I'm running an OLPC Time Travel Game Jam on July 29-31, 2008.

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Why bother? I've already won

Developed for the XO?

Is this a Windows or Linux game designed for Sugar's GUI, or can one develop specifically for Sugar and run it wherever the Sugar interface is (regardless of whether it is running on Linux or Windows)?

Re:Developed for the XO?

The idea is to develop specifically for the set of libraries associated with Sugar. This means libraries like pyGTK [pygtk.org], pygame [pygame.org], olpcgames [laptop.org], and in this case, pyBox2d [google.com] and Elements [laptop.org].

There is a lot of information about creating OLPC Activities on the OLPC Wiki [laptop.org].

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It's being hosted at or near 1 Cambridge Center, the OLPC headquarters. You would be surprised at the number of people near any city in the world who would be interested in such an event. Even the OLPC Game Jam in Pittsburgh last year managed to get a few dozen people. Most of the people who participate are not professional game developers, artists, or musicians, but people who enjoy doing these things in their spare time.

Either way, there's a remote development option.

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Boston *is* known for music and art; it just tends to get lost in the shadow of NYC. But by the standards of a normal city, it is just fine [dreams.org]. Fwiw, Boston is also close enough to Providence for such an event to have some appeal for folks like the RISD crowd.

Personally, if we're talking about areas with vibrant music and game development scenes, screw California; I would love to see such events done in Orlando and Austin.

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It is python, with python bindings for multimedia. It will run wherever you want.

Fantastic contraption

Fantastic contraption is pretty enjoyable. Its a physics game where the physics actually defines gameplay - and each level can be completed multiple ways.

Lots of time wasted in the office on this one.

www.fantasticcontraption.com

Slingshot is pretty fun

and it teaches you a little physics.
http://www.slingshot-game.org/ [slingshot-game.org]

Fantastic Contraption

I just blew my free time this weekend finishing Fantastic Contraption [fantasticcontraption.com]

So it's a Flash game, and you need the internet to post your design and see other people's designs. But it was pure joy.

FWIW, on the forums they're having a design contest for the official level 21. Deadline is this Friday 8/26, though, and you need to be a $10 registered user to create your own levels.

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Yeah I wasted some of my life on that a couple of weekends back. It's awesome and I couldn't stop playing until I got to the end...

Unfortunately alot of the solutions were similar... just attach as many wheels to the box as you can and hope you have the power to move it over the obstacle. Some of the later levels were really good though. Great example of a physics flash game IMO.

My 12-year-old unbricked his XO!

I gave the kids OLPC XOs last December, and my 11 year old bricked his in less than a week... he tried to replace sugar with a full gnome desktop, (even though I told him it was a bad idea) and things just sort of devolved from there... he ended up with a horribly corrupted filesystem and couldn't boot.

Day before yesterday he finally managed to completely wipe and reload it with the latest XO build.

I didn't help, he fixed it himself. Probably spent about 20 hours on it all told.

Do Relativity!

I would love to see a game that accurately and obviously incorporates time-dialation and other weird stuff from the theory of relativity in such a way that after playing one gets an intuitive feel for how the stuff works. How would two space ships fighting each other look to each other, and from a third POV, if both were moving at 0.8c? How would your tactics be forced to change? Or what if had a trading game involving beings with very long lives (so that interstellar space travel is useful) and very slo

Re:pyBox2D

Not quite. It is a set of Python bindings for Box2d, which is written in C++. Just about everything cpu intensive in Python is written in C or C++ and uses the Python C API (or ctypes or SWIG).

Re:not what they really need

The XO was meant for educating childs (developing countries or not). A game that makes them understand physics, thru a game, goes to the core of the mission of those machines.

Spreadsheets (childs 1st need to learn how to do and understand math) or file managers (the interface somewhat hides that is a filesystem below) dont look as compatible with those goals.

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I might be more enthusiastic about that if the ad were asking for any physicists to show up... As a physicist, I don't really trust "graphic artist, sound designer, musician in the Boston area" to get the physics right. If there's one thing we don't need, it's more kids coming in who think they know physics, but have it all wrong.

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Is for childs, still forming basic concepts. Probably newton's gravity in a game will be better than einstein's one at this level.

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Sugar already has a file manager

Sugar has a Journal, which is nice for what it does, but doesn't replace a file manager. If you ever tried to exchange data between an XO-1 and a normal computer you will quickly realize that there is a big need for a classic file manager that works the way all other computers work, since the Journal just screws things up big time if you insert a normal USB stick with a normal directory structure on it. This is especially important since Sugar is meant to teach kids how computers work and how to write appli

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I tried to run it on XO under wine, and it looks like an example how not to make a game for XO -- OpenGL used for everything, even in 2D side-view mode, eye-candy transitions that remain enabled in low-graphics mode, and, of course, the fact that you need Wine to run it.

XO has no 3D acceleration, and even though it can use software rendering, game should either use 2D graphics only, or assume that it will have very slow rendering speed. It's possible to do polygon drawing with simple 3D projection/occlusion