Global Game Jam 2009

Our very first Global Game Jam was a huge success! So much can be said about such a great event, but I’ll stick to some personal accounts and reflections for now.

First, on the topic of the webcasts: despite how inherently boring it may be to watch a bunch of people sitting at computers typing, I actually really enjoyed watching my fellow jammers around the world develop games at their sites via the Ustream-powered webcasts that were featured on the Global Game Jam website during the event.

The website

Designing, building and administering our website turned out to be a very challenging and rewarding experience. Thankfully, I was working with two great teammates, Susan Gold, an amazing woman who of course was the main organizer of the whole Jam, website included, and Foaad Khosmood -- GGJ Organizer from UC Santa Cruz -- who pretty much single-handedly built the site based on our design discussions.

We had roughly a mere three weeks to build the whole thing from scratch. Thankfully, we quickly found Foaad, who is an expert with the Drupal content management system (CMS), and determined that a Drupal-based site would meet our needs and could be built in about two weeks and change (because of Foaad’s expertise, mind you).

The event

I participated in the event as a programmer at the MIT location, graciously hosted by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT lab. It was an awesome weekend. We all gathered together (about 20-30 of us) in the lounge at 5pm to watch Kyle Gambler’s humorous and wise keynote advice, hear the “constraints” (read: inspirations) put upon our games, and form groups.

Phil Tan, who ran the MIT site’s jam, had us brainstorm game ideas based upon the constraints/inspirations given to us, and then we presented our ideas to everyone else. After that, we wrote our ideas down in short form on index cards and pinned them to the a giant board, where we then put index cards with our name and primary role (programmer, visual artists, sound engineer, etc.) on the concept we were most interested in pursuing.

That system seemed to work out very well. Jeff Ward & I, who had already decided to work together and (thankfully) were both inspired by a similar concept, found our primary art-help in a friend of ours, Amanda Cosmos, because… um… I guess she liked our idea the best (or maybe just because most other people were still waffling over what concept to go with and she was eager to get started).

The games!

I’ve only had a chance to play a small handful of games created during the jam, but I’m vowing to play at least 20 or 30 of them (they’re all short – it was a requirement put upon them by the jam) in the coming months, and I’ll be sure to post about a few notable ones up here.

(Okay, just a few quick hits: check out The Beat and Move Mouse to Fulfill Destiny)

The games can all be downloaded directly from the GGJ website via the game browser. You can search by location, platform, and/or genre. There’s also a voting system to help you find the most-loved games.

If you have any comments on how we can make the website better for playing this year’s games or better for next year’s event (or if you just need help with it for any reason), send me an email (web@globalgamejam.org) or check out our Facebook group that we created for discussing the GGJ and everything related.