Global Game Jam

Last Friday, I attended my first Global Game Jam. I heard about this last semester, when EGaDS held a mock Game Jam competition (which I had also participated in). After my first experience at the mock competition, I was itching for a chance to give it another shot, as I had not managed to finish the game as much as I would have liked to in the last one. But the competition was months away then.

January finally rolled around with a new year, a new semester started at school, and I started my new internship at Twisted Pixel.

When I got to the site, the seventh floor of the UTA building, I didn't really know who I wanted to be with. The friends that I had worked with last semester had all broken up into different groups already, and besides, I wanted to work with different people to gain more experience. Despite not initially joining a group, I and two others who were looking for a group like me haphazardly decided to work together, even though it took us about an hour to decide on a team name (Tic Tac Turtles). We made a surprisingly good team at the jam, even after another person joined in about 2-3 hours into it.

After listening to the keynote, I was struck by the theme; as opposed to the normal string of text that appears on the screen, we were instead presented with a picture. The theme was a picture of the Ouroboros, and if you're not familiar with it, you can check out the entry on wikipedia.

I learned quite a bit while programming during the event. Of the roughly 38 hours I was awake during the 48 hour event, here's a quick list of some of the more interesting things I learned:

• Hanging out with sleep deprived people generally leads to some pretty funny situations, like when a person immediately forgets what he or she said or when you somehow fudge up a perfectly easy sentence when you try saying it multiple times.
• When you're sleep deprived, time goes by fast. In fact, the time between midnight and 6 am go by especially fast regardless.
• Versioning software like SVN make team programming more fun and efficient.
• You will think of more features that you want added to the game that your code cannot support without a large amount of code changing.
• Having multi-skilled people for this kind of thing is a big plus. Among the four of us, three of us held at least two different roles during the development. The odd one out felt bad and treated us to food at Veggie Heaven.
• Making games harder to make the player develop strategies to get past is a way to make a game more interesting, and sometimes more fun.
• One hour is a very short amout of time.
• Sunrises still look awesome.
• Peanut butter actually complements the taste of a burger. (Try it!)

At the end, teams had finished anywhere between a skeleton of a game and a fully fleshed out one. I was pretty content with our project, as we had implemented solid game mechanics and gameplay with very few bugs. You can check out our final product of 48 hours of labor at the Global Game Jam site.