Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Photos & Videos from the Game Jam

The game jam was amazing! This post contains all/most of the pictures and videos that we took during the game jam. You can find a playlist of all the videos on the club's YouTube channel.


Before the theme was announced, the participants had one hour to eat dinner, socialize, and form teams. Some people spent this time creating random assets or practicing with some tools.






There were a total of 15 participants, and they divided themselves into five teams:


Tyler brought in his ridiculously powerful desktop computer with an HDTV for a display. He even brought a rubber duck for debugging.


The fan at the top of his computer doesn't really do anything other than spin and look cool, so Robbie decided to tape the rubber duck to the fan, which resulted in the team's name:


This next video was taken at the announcement of the theme:


Once the theme was announced, each team started brainstorming.

The Spinning Ducks (Youhao, Dilan, and Tyler)
Team Samurai Goroh (Victor, Chris, and Justin)
David's Not Here (Razz, Ethan, and David [working remotely])
Ctrl+F+U (William and Patrick [Patrick was the camerman])
The Combines (Shien, Cindy, Lauren, and Livio)
Everyone was able to come up with a game idea fairly quickly, except for the Combines, who spent their first few hours brainstorming and goofing off.



The game jam went on for 36 hours. Each team settled on a different game idea and got to work. During the first night, many of them went home to sleep, while on the second night, most stayed in the room over night.






Because Patrick, our cameraman, was also making a game, we didn't get too many pictures of him, but the following videos were taken by Harvey.








We wanted to make the first meal that we served at the game jam to be good, so we paid Tyler's mom to cook a few lasagnas for us. They were very delicious, but unfortunately, something went wrong while in transit and we had to scrape off some of the lasagna from the bottom of the tin foil containers.








At one point while the Combines were listening to video game music, Cindy opened up Ocarina of Time in an emulator so that we could listen to the Song of Storms from the source. She left Link idle in the Windmill Hut for multiple hours while the Song of Storms looped in the background.










We thought the game jam was so much fun that we immediately began planning a date for when we should hold our next game jam. The current idea is to hold one during the three day weekend at the beginning of every semester (Labor Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day). We think that holding the game jam periodically will provide an incentive for newcomers to start practicing making games sooner.

We were able to record a time lapse of the entire event by using the room's webcam:

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