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.

That's nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:not what they really need

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm. Sugar already has a file manager, whatever your opinion of it, and the XO is pretty much stock 32bit x86 linux, so you have plenty of other choices.

No sugar native spreadsheet; but webapps and linux native apps are doable in about 4 seconds.

Obviously, better to have things brought into sugar then not, if kids are going to be using them; but it isn't as though the XO is a terrible wasteland without sugar native apps, it's just fedora with a funny WM.

Fantastic contraption

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[gQuigs]

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

Re:Developed for the XO?

[PaintyThePirate]

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].

Re:pyBox2D

[PaintyThePirate]

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:Developed for the XO?

[PaintyThePirate]

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.

Re:Developed for the XO?

[RustinHWright]

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.