A Game Jam Weekend

This weekend was my first time participating in a game jam. The guys at Intuition Games were kind enough to host the event at their office in Ames. It was a pretty cool experience, thanks to everyone for making it a fun time. I had to end up ditching out on the last day as my son came home from vacation, so I'm not sure what the end results of the jam were.

I know I spent most of the weekend attempting to setup a frame for a prototype for what was titled Super False Alarm. A concept that was inspired by events that happened the first night of jam. A fire alarm went off in the building and after about 20 minutes, firemen showed up and told us we had to leave the building. It was an interesting sequence of events however, as five minutes later we were given the all clear. As we started approaching the building fireworks started going off in the background, synchronicity at its best .



This gave everyone some fuel for brainstorming ideas. It was Mike that first proposed the idea for Super False Alarm. Greg liked it and off we went attempting to come up with a functioning prototype by the end of the weekend. Brandon and I both fluctuated from attempting to learn to use the Unity game engine to make a 2.5D game, and simply getting custom engines adjusted to use for the project as Greg diligently developed art resources.

The idea of the game was that you were an employee at a company and you were making pop-corn that ended up setting off the fire alarm. When the fire department showed up and you were told to evacuate, you told them to stuff it. So, it was a game of stealth, trying to make it as long as possible without being captured by the firemen.

Other games that were being worked on in different teams included a Space Game with a sexual theme and miniature golf type of game play elements, that was meant to be included in the current TIGSOURCE competition. A game about Flaming Sex Zepplins, which I admit I regret not taking a peek at. And a game about hang gliding.


Evan and his Bad Ass goggles.



This was my first game jam and overall, I was not disappointed. What I did take a way from the experience is this however, go to a jam with some kind of plan. It being my first jam, I really didn't know what to expect and as such was not prepared what so ever. Attempting to learn new technology at the jam should not be a focus. Instead having an idea of what you may end up doing, and being familiar with the tools that you are going to be using will ensure that you can actually concentrate on developing the game. This could have been achieved in this instance by communicating better a head of time and talking with the guys that were attending about an approach to take so that when jam time arrived everyone was ready and on the same page.

There's another jam in August, but seeing how my work schedule has been, I may not be able to make it to that one, although, I may take the approach of participating remotely if possible. It was good fuel to get me going back into the right direction as with contract work and my day job taking up a lot of time this year, I've been neglecting my passion for game development for much too long. I met a lot of cool and interesting people and got to play some disc golf on a new course, which was totally bad ass.