Introducing students to Capture Go

I am enjoying teaching introduction to game design after my years-long hiatus. The class is very eager, the sort that I rarely have to wait for comments and instead have to urge to move on.

On Thursday, we discussed core mechanics. It's something we had talked about earlier in the semester as well, but now we returned to it so we could talk about primary systems, secondary systems, and so on—and how crucial it is for small teams to remove anything beyond secondary systems. One interesting aspect from the discussion was the question of what is "core" in Skyrim: is it combat? discussion? walking about? This allowed us to discuss a designer's perspective on elegance, how it is not the same as goodness of design, but that there are good reasons to strive for it.

I followed this by teaching them to play Capture Go. I don't often cover this in my class, but I was inspired to put it into Thursday's discussion of core mechanisms given that Go is practically all core. There's just not much else to it, which is part of why it's such a fascinating object of study.

I introduced the game, and we got into pairs to play. There was an odd number in attendance, so I got to join a student for a few rounds, which was a treat. She was having some trouble seeing the patterns, so I started pointing out when I was about to win, and this led to our having better games. Also, however, she also set up her own goals, such as covering the star points; this was more important to her than winning the match.

After playing for only about seven minutes, I polled the room to see if anyone had thoughts to share. Everyone seemed to have fun, and I didn't get the sense that anyone was confused by the rules. One student pointed out how there was a strategic element to hitting the edge of the board in such a way that they could entrap the opponent. What really struck me was a discussion from another pair, where they immediately recognized that there was "aggressive" and "defensive" play. They described how, at first, one of them was defensive to the others' aggression, but that aggression seemed to win out, so then they both played aggressively. It doesn't matter to me which is more strategic; what I want to point out is that they recognized that in this simple stone-placing game, there was something deeper than simply marking spaces: there was strategy, there was a feeling, there were patterns, even if they only scratched the surface.

This neatly tied up our discussion of cores and elegance, and I have marked my teaching notes to remind myself to use this combination again.

Shove Off! at Global Game Jam 2026

This past weekend, I participated in Global Game Jam at Ball State University. This was the first time in many years that I was not hosting the event, and it was a nice change to simply jam and not have to worry about logistics.

My team created Shove Off!, a local-multiplayer arcade game. The source and binaries are also available on GitHub. The game is for four players with game controllers.

Title Screen

My son and I started kicking around ideas right after the theme announcement. We briefly discussed making a survivors-like where the powers come from masks, but we tossed it as requiring too much balancing. We pivoted to using masks of world cultures to provide power-ups in a platformer brawler game. This idea played well into our observation that local multiplayer games can generate a lot of fun even if they are rough around the edges. Choosing this to go forward, we then decided on pushing as the core player interaction would be such that masks modify it. (Incidentally, I have played Smash Bros. exactly once, and my son has not played it at all.) Our whiteboard designs revealed an opportunity for two kinds of attacks: a horizontal push from the ground and a diagonal push from the air. The simple level layout we sketched provided all we needed for a playground.

We tried to get the core gameplay working Friday night, but we could not get all the pieces together. Crucially, we did figure out the sizes and shapes that everything would need to be. We also recruited a musician who agreed to write a retro-style, high-energy song together with sfxr-style sound effects for us.

Saturday morning, we got the core gameplay and representative placeholder art in place; that is, we replaced the Godot icon with stick figures. We enjoyed the core gameplay even without powerups. Knowing we were a small team with limited time, we decided to try to build a complete game using only the core gameplay. If it was good, it could be what we shipped, and if we had time, we could add powerups. During the day, the theme became less generic and focused more on lucha libre. Masked wrestlers pushing each other off of platforms seemed the right way to go. Once the musician's main theme landed, it changed everything: the song was perfect for the madcap gameplay and bold visuals we had brought together.

My youngest son was the only one with nothing scheduled Saturday afternoon, so I invited him to come hang out at the jam. I set him on some research tasks, including finding fonts and figuring out a palette for the characters. He started by simply poking around Google Fonts, but then I taught him about the value of using image search for reference images. We brought up images of luchador posters, which changed his whole approach. It was a good learning opportunity, and I'm glad he came along, even if he had to spend some time awaiting assignments.

Starting the match

Many of the posters we reviewed featured a starburst background, and it looked to me like something I could do with a shader. I tried puzzling it out myself but did not make much progress. Shaders are interesting to me but I frequently get stymied by them. I ended up searching the Web and finding exactly what I was looking for. Sunday morning, I added my favorite subtle feature: at the end of the game, the background color changes to match the thematic color of the winner. One of the other jammers required shader cleverness in his game, and I told him how I'd love to lead a seminar on the Book of Shaders. He said he'd be interested, so I guess I only need nine more undergraduates who are intrigued by this intersection of art, math, and design.

I should mention that all of the visuals were done by my other son who was in attendance. He did a great job iterating on ideas and taking feedback, reworking the characters several times as we worked towards our goal. One of the best things we did in terms of the project architecture was to separate the body animations into their own scene so that he could work on those independently while I worked in nearby systems. We only had one merge conflict during the whole weekend, and it was quickly resolved.

By Sunday morning, we had already covered the "mask" theme with our luchadores, but we had time to build on the core gameplay. Our testing showed that players could get stuck in pushing matches, and so we pulled our favorite powerup from Friday night's listing: fireballs. Every few seconds, a stylized sun shows up in the middle of the screen, and the player to grab it gets three fireballs. These proved perfect for breaking up the gameplay.

We were all happy with how the game turned out, and it was popular during the post-jam party. I felt good about making a complete, playable, and enjoyable game. I have spent a lot of time the past several months in preproduction and exploring engineering practices, but I haven't shipped anything in a while. The jam was a great opportunity to go from nothing to something in 48 hours.

If you try out the game, I hope you'll let us know what you think.