Durban DevLAN March Report: Full of win or epic fail?

On March 6th 2010 (also known as ‘last week Saturday’), a group of like-minded individuals, professional and enthusiast software developers alike, all passionately interested in disciplines related to the development of computer and videogames, gathered at an undisclosed location (CTI’s campus in Durban North… 59 Adelaide Tambo Drive) to discuss their common interests in this exciting field.

Little did we (I) know that everyone would soon have their faces glued to their monitors and their hands stuck to their computer peripherals (some nice imagery there) in an effort to create a mini-game masterpiece in under eight hours.

At the beginning of the day, this garbage bin was empty. By the end of the day, it would be overflowing with discarded junk food wrappers and condiments - a diet of saturated fats and caffeine was our fuel.

The clock was ticking and there were games to be made.

A clue as to the real reason for the gathering can be found in the name of the event – a ‘DevLAN’ means a ‘development LAN,’ in which people (crazy people) bring their computer/laptops to a central location, hook them up to a network and ostensibly work on the creation of a computer game, big or small.

In order to keep the scope of this particular DevLAN to a minimum, all attendants were supplied with an overall theme that would form the basis for their game. The theme this time? WarioWare mini-games.

Each game created would need to adhere to the rules of Nintendo’s series of classic WarioWare mini-game collections: It would need to be extremely simple to play, very easy to understand, and last only six seconds, before a win or fail state is attained.

Other than those rules, the rest was up to the individual creator, and even though the limitations sound brutal, it’s often when game designers are most constrained that they come up with their most creative and resourceful ideas, which was definitely the case at the Durban DevLAN.

By the end of the day, we had a six second role-playing game, a six-second 2D brawler, a frantic juggling game, a dress-up game (complete with victory animation!) and a motion-controlled Zune game in which you have to shake the device to save a kitten from drowning.

You can download and play most of the games developed at the Durban DevLAN over here (Note: Pentium Pro with at least 16 MB RAM required to play), as well as watch a video featuring ‘the kitten drowning game’ (that sentence made me sad) below:

After a good few hours of coding up a storm, a few of the intrepid developers took a break to play the awesome-looking physical board game (I know!), Tabletop TF2, a card-based Team Fortress 2 game (I know!) created by Megan “dammit” Hughes. Fun was had by all (four people).

And so the sun set on what we hope will be the first of many regular DevLANs in Durban, in order to afford game developers here the opportunity to get together, discuss their craft, stretch their brains and put their talents to the test with some more rapid prototyping sessions in the future – I think we can all agree that the event was, in modern parlance, ‘full of win.’

You can check out a bunch more photos taken at the gathering by Megan Hughes, but only if you think my photos weren’t good enough.

… Dang, I see how it is.