Global Game Jam at UW-Whitewater
If you’re here for the games, here they are. For my reflections on the GGJ in general and our site in particular, read on.
If you want to know what our setup looked like, here are a couple representative pictures (there was a lot of hunching over laptops).
A couple weekends ago, I organized the local Global Game Jam site at UW-Whitewater. This was the first year that UWW participated and I want to share some of the results and reflections of the event. Nine dedicated jammers participated on three teams. We chose team membership based on the distribution of skills; each jammer was either a writer/designer, artist, or implementer, and the teams formed naturally once we found out that we had three of each of these roles. I used “implementer” because we didn’t have any proper programmers; implementers were those who had some prior knowledge with a game creation or programming tool (Flash, Scratch, and Gamemaker).
We all lamented the absence of programmers at our site, a problem that might have been avoided by recruiting participants earlier or working together with a representative of computer science to recruit students (both of which will happen next year). Even without programmers, one participant learned Gamemaker in great depth while one of our writers became immersed in Inform7 about half-way through the jam and ended up working with another team to implement their interactive fiction game (The Child).
All of this was great for me – I had wanted to play around with Inform7 and Gamemaker, and now have rudimentary experience with both. I’m also hopeful that this group will keep the momentum going – they’ve almost completed the process of forming a student organization dedicated to creating games. There are more competitions and jams coming up, both local (PlayExpo) and not (LudumDare, IndieCade), stay tuned!
