Earlier this year, three noble South Africans participated remotely in the annual Global Game Jam in a quest for truth, glory and really rapid game development.

Teams all over the world were given 48 hours to make a game using a handful of keywords and whatever tools they could get their hands on. Local developers Danny “dislekcia” Day, Marc “Aequitas” Luck and Rodain “Nandrew” Joubert banded together and managed to get together a little offering which they called the 48 Hour War. It was built as a satirical jab at the madness and futility of modern warfare.

Here's their account of how those two days went and what they learned from making this game.

Rodain "Nandrew" Joubert

I've had a fair amount of experience with rapid game prototyping in the past. In fact, about ninety percent of all the hackneyed attempts that I've ever delivered are the result of no more than 24 hours of furious designing, coding and energy drink consumption.

What's considerably trickier, however, is working in a high-pressure environment with two other developers on a project guided by a handful of keywords and a looming 48 hour deadline. It's one thing to think up something by yourself and throw it onto a computer screen, but it's a whole other kettle of digital fish when you're trying to organise and assemble a project from scratch – conflicting ideas and different development approaches can be the bane of any team's work scheme unless you have developers who are quick to pick up problems and work towards middle ground. Fortunately, we seemed to do this rather well – even if there were a few initial hiccups involving chinese food, misunderstood prototypes and me spontaneously falling asleep on the couch after a harrowing session of Castle Crashers.

My advice to anybody in this sort of situation: take some time out first to brainstorm. Get a bunch of random ideas going and be prepared to throw a few away – including some of the awesome-sounding ones. We had a glorious concept for a game that simulated three developers trapped inside a house, working on a project and doing their best not to flip out and murder each other (particularly fun as it would be poking fun at our own trials and tribulations) but we eventually decided against it in favour of a clearer and more practical plan – good old entrenched warfare between two rival states.

48 Hour War. Truly a fitting title.

The next major step which I felt to be of utmost importance (in the interest of clarity, cohesion and national security) was writing stuff down. It's amazing how much more or less intimidating an idea can becomes when it's on paper and you can – at a glance – have a look at the relationship between all of your basic game elements and figure out what needs to be done first. A good design doc should be a necessity for any game project you make, and it becomes even more important when working with team mates who don't have your exact vision for the game wedged into their skulls.

Although I did assist with programming the final product (and about several thousand rejected prototypes before that), my pride and joy on this project was my ability to shuffle off into a corner somewhere and tinker with sound effects. I commonly evangelise the good use of sound in games – not only does it add to the atmosphere wonderfully, but it's something that's actually really easy to home-brew and the sound creation process can be incredibly rewarding if you just let yourself have fun with it.

Since we were working on a satirical project, my sounds could be as funky and over-the-top as I wanted – mortar fire and explodey noises emanated from my mouth in a grossly onomatopoeic fashion. No professional equipment, no fancy devices, just an open-source sound editor and whatever my imagination had handy. I even lured dislekcia in to deliver an impressively screamy, 10-second-long warcry straight into the beleaguered microphone. He ended up fainting from the exertion, but we got a really rad sound clip out of it.

Because we didn't really have a sophisticated version control system to help the three of us merge our work streams (the best thing we had was a function in Game Maker to import certain resources one-way), we improvised and ended up with a system that actually worked rather well. Dislekcia found out that he could add graphics and animated art assets to the game by importing his graphics along with a "controller object" which would deal with animation and other fine details. In this way, the only thing that our lead programmer (the ever-so-hax-filled Aequitas) had to do was correctly attach the control object to the necessary actors in our game, and the graphics would magically appear on the screen carrying out the instructions that Danny had written for the controller object back on his PC.

I thought that this was a brilliant workaround and executed a similar method for my sounds – aside from giving Aequitas the raw sound resources for the game, I also gave him what I fancily dubbed "SFX controllers" that internally hunted down various sounds and mashed them up together in a way that would make them sound convincing to listeners. This was incredibly useful when, for example, I wanted to simulate an army on the warpath – instead of one looping sound effect, I took a whole bunch of different samples and overlapped them with one another in a semi-random manner. This gave listeners a similar – but effectively unique – sound every time an army was sent to storm the enemy, replacing that ever-so-irksome obvious looping which gamers have become accustomed to hearing.

I didn't end up using all of my sounds (tightened deadlines meant that not all of the art/code could be realistically processed in time) but as with the cool game design ideas, I believe that it's important to know what to throw away and when, no matter how tempting it is to hoard everything.

So what we ended up with was a fun, quirky and hopefully thought-provoking offering – something that I'll modestly claim was enhanced by the work of a totally kickass sound engineer.