Posted by Garin Fahlman | 2 Comments
Learning To Listen To Our Hearts At Global Game Jam 13
Did you know that during the last weekend of January, over 3,000 video games were created? Did you know that these games were being built in over 60 countries? And did you know that over 13,000 individuals designed, wrote, programmed, and finished these games in a measly 48 hours?
From Friday to Sunday, these feats of game-making were accomplished as part of Global Game Jam 2013.
The Global Game Jam is an annual gathering of designers, developers, artists, musicians, and anyone else who who has any interest in making a game on a ridiculous time limit. Not only is the Global Game Jam the biggest game jam in the world, taking place in 63 countries and 321 jam sites, but the Vancouver site at UBC’s life sciences atrium was the single biggest site in the world.
On Friday afternoon, jammers showed up with whatever equipment they desired – laptops, console dev kits, musical instruments, Wacom tablets, or just a fedora and a big idea – and started getting ready to create.
I arrived at UBC at around 6:30 to find a room of over 250 people talking, eating, gaming . . . but not yet jamming. It was supposed to have already begun, but a streak of unimaginable bad luck had been following around the jam for days before it actually began.
Not long before the event, Vancouver jam organizer Kimberly Voll was sitting in her office surrounded by vital jam equipment – computers, servers, and boxes upon boxes of swag – when 30,000 litres of water suddenly burst forth from the ceiling and landed directly on her head.
Most of the swag, several computers, and the office ceiling was lost in the ensuing flood, but the determination that the jam would go on prevailed, and the charity of the Vancouver indie community replaced much of the lost inventory.
As the jam was about to get started Friday evening, it was clear that whatever malevolent force had caused the flood was still feeling vengeful – the first day started out with intermittent internet outages, which would continue to plague the jam over the three days.
Despite these technical speed bumps, however, the jam needed to get started, and it wasn’t long until the Vancouver Global Game Jam was finally up and running.
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Hey! It’s Austin from the jam here.
That’s a really cool article, and it’s really neat to see an outside perspective on the jam, or at least a perspective of someone who wasn’t sleeping on floors for two days straight :)
I’d like to expand on the comment on game maker, though. I don’t think it really reflects my oppinion as written. It’s a fine tool, and has been used by some very talented people to make incredible things for a long time. If you do sprite editing in an application without game-specific features like I do, it has very useful tools built in for previewing sprite sheets at different framerates, and for testing out tilemaps to work out the visual hitches. My comment was more directed to the fact that, from my perspective, YOYO games are more concerned with making game maker look like every other DIY game creation tool out there, and not necessarily with real usability. The end result is that the editor as I remember it is two layers deep in some sort of bizarre project manager that doesn’t really seem to add a lot to the program.
Anyhow, if anyone has any questions, I’d be happy to answer them here!
haha. I broke it, yo