Did anyone attend Global Game Jam?
Posted by PoV (twitter: @mikekasprzak)
January 31st, 2009 6:20 pm
I’m curious.
We did a little bit of promotion for the Global Game Jam, but I’m wondering if anybody actually did (or is) attending.
Do we (perhaps) cater to the “too lazy to go outside” crowd, or the “I don’t have time for that” crowd?
Or maybe you were there, representing the big LD?
Your thoughts in the comments.
I considered going as there was a location fairly close. I actually thought about it for quite a few weeks feeling it out. I was pretty curious about it from the aspect of never having done a team / in person compo before but in the end I think those aspects actually made me a bit hesitant. I really enjoy the freedom of the solo comps as far as when I spend a weekend on something. I think a lot of us here maybe work with people quite often and sometimes it is really nice to just be the only person working on something. Speaking for myself I guess. The other thing that made me hesitant was that I got the impression that it would be a flash-heavy competition at the particular host I was looking at and I don’t know flash (yet) so I let that influence me a little too. I will probably do one of these eventually so I appreciated that you promoted it! I was just too on the fence.
Anyway– those are my thoughts.
It turned out I was the most experienced programmer in my team. Not only that, I learned that when pressed I really can help program an entire game in 48 hours. I haven’t done LD in the past, but now it seems much more doable…
I was at GGJ in Los Angeles, I arrived a bit late, my 1.5 hour drive there became 4 hours due to traffic, so I missed out on the possibility of pitching a game idea, and I had to get the game pitches quickly by word of mouth so I could get on a team. The theme was “as long as we stay together, we’ll always have problems” with a subtheme of either thin, rotation, or evolution.
I was on the team that did “spinni mini planet” where you rotate a planet to catch color coded blocks to build cities. I was involved with the initial design, but with a guy making the game in flash/actionscript I wasn’t much help with the coding (haven’t used flash in years) and the art and music were covered, so I just chimed in design ideas where I could. After 26 hours, I decided to depart. They finished the game.
It was an interesting event, it did seem like alot of people were using flash or game maker, I should have worked harder at being on a team using c++ so I could have been more useful. It’s nice to get out and meet other developers. Looking forward to more events like this.
Hello!
I attended GGJ in Ankara, Turkey. Here is our game:
http://globalgamejam.org/games/itchy
I think it has unique, balanced gameplay and engaging sound effects.
I was following and learning from LD and enjoying the games (especially Rara Racer) while preparing for GGJ. Two friends of mine also attended GGJ and we are looking forward to the next LD.
See you…
Unfortunately I had other plans for that weekend. I found out that the Chicago area one was hosted by my alma mater, but I was disappointed to find that they did mostly XNA. Out of four or five games, only one was playable on a non-Microsoft platform, and it was a Flash app.
nah; I was busy coding some stuff that weekend, though there was something on not too far away.
Yep — I made it out to the Scotland site and put together:
http://globalgamejam.org/games/jarhead (bugfixed version here: pacmansion.net/~doches/Jarhead.7z)
GBGames: Yeah, most of the teams at mine worked in XNA as well. I prototyped our game in Ruby, then ported it (sometime early Sat. morning) to Python. Excitement.
I also went to the GGJ in San Francisco. It was pretty fun, but I had a very inexperienced programmer and a very hotheaded programmer on my team, and that made it hard to have as much of a good time as I could have. Our game ended up being a cool concept but incredibly difficult to control.