EGaDS Game Jam 2013

Recently, about two to three weeks ago, I helped organize and run EGaDS Game Jam 2013. It was a lot better than last year, from what I remembered. This time we had sponsors, a much larger number of participants (54 people, 19 teams, 19 games), prizes, and a bunch of stuff that we gave away like t-shirts, mugs, and bags. We even had a pool of about thirty themes to randomly pick from and the one that got selected was... "redundant". What a terrible theme, who thought of that? Oh, right, that was me. Sorry.

Anyway, the game jam was great, but we also ran into a few problems. This was the first time we had judges and we wanted to make sure that everything ran smoothly. So, we added a few restrictions to the contest that, in hindsight, were probably bad ideas.

Game submissions were uploaded to Box (not Dropbox) and were limited to web runnable programs (flash, unity, html5) or jar files. We wanted the judges to, for the most part, open a url in their browser. This would make it easy for judges to open and run the game. In order to make sure the judges understood the games, we asked that teams also include a README with the game to explain anything that might be potentially confusing.

As it turns out, the Box file browser interface doesn't actually let you directly access a file; it actually can only show you a preview of the file and offers a download link. In addition, many of our judges using a Mac had an out of date JVM and were not able to run jars compiled with newer versions of Java, which many games were compiled with. Other than the running problems, the README files were sometimes not provided or tended to not explain the game sufficiently and judges couldn't figure out how to play some games. These problems made judging the games cumbersome and difficult for our judges. I also had to do a lot of running around trying to get games to run on judge's computers.

Meanwhile, a few rooms down the hallway, participants waiting for the results showed each other their games. Everyone's game worked on their respective computers and if they needed to explain anything that was confusing about the game, they could.

After seeing what happened it became pretty apparent that the judging would have gone much more smoothly if we just had the judges in the same room with everyone else instead of trying to get the games to work on judges' computers. So, after having a post-mortem meeting about it, we decided that it might be better to remove the limit on submissions and instead require teams to pitch their game at the end of the jam at a sort of open house thing. That way, the games already work, they can be explained, and, even better, participants can attempt to convince judges that their game is the best game. Everyone wants to see everyone else's game anyway, and it would be a good opportunity for people to practice their pitching skills.

So, next year we'll try doing that and hopefully do a better job.