The Global Game Jam took place on January 28-31st this year. Even though it's "global" and actually happening all over the place, I flew down to California to hang out at the UC Santa Cruz site.
Nostalgia aside (hanging out in the older engineering building! eating food at the dining hall! walking around in the trees by all these places I used to live or go to class!) it was a pretty awesome place to be for GGJ. First of all, there's a swanky games lab for the undergrads in a particular year-long game development course. Second of all, UCSC has programs and people who sincerely believe in an event like GGJ, including some of the organizers of the global event itself. Thirdly, many of the people, grads and undergrads and profs who are part of the various game development/research labs at UCSC were there, and made it this highly motivated, creative, competent, productive atmosphere.
Comparatively, I was a GGJ slacker, due to looming deadlines and other in-progress games to work on. But it was a nice environment to be in and I got a lot of things done. Here are photos of people making games!
I did actually take a few hours somewhere to make a "game". The theme of the year was Extinction, and after discussing it with Adam (also preoccupied with deadlines) a bunch, this game out: http://superfiretruck.com/spacething/ It's basically a "choose your own adventure" with very limited options and where you will probably die at the end. Grim... yeah.
Many/all of the other games there were much better, such as:
Check out all the photos here!! http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaflurbaleen/sets/72157626076005256/
Nostalgia aside (hanging out in the older engineering building! eating food at the dining hall! walking around in the trees by all these places I used to live or go to class!) it was a pretty awesome place to be for GGJ. First of all, there's a swanky games lab for the undergrads in a particular year-long game development course. Second of all, UCSC has programs and people who sincerely believe in an event like GGJ, including some of the organizers of the global event itself. Thirdly, many of the people, grads and undergrads and profs who are part of the various game development/research labs at UCSC were there, and made it this highly motivated, creative, competent, productive atmosphere.
Comparatively, I was a GGJ slacker, due to looming deadlines and other in-progress games to work on. But it was a nice environment to be in and I got a lot of things done. Here are photos of people making games!
I did actually take a few hours somewhere to make a "game". The theme of the year was Extinction, and after discussing it with Adam (also preoccupied with deadlines) a bunch, this game out: http://superfiretruck.com/spacething/ It's basically a "choose your own adventure" with very limited options and where you will probably die at the end. Grim... yeah.
Many/all of the other games there were much better, such as:
- Generate Exterminate: http://globalgamejam.org/2011/generate-exterminate
- Within the Darkness... http://globalgamejam.org/2011/within-darkness or directly online: http://randonia.com/ggj2011/
- Tower of Corpses: http://globalgamejam.org/2011/tower-corpses
- Impact Event: http://globalgamejam.org/2011/impact-event
Check out all the photos here!! http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaflurbaleen/sets/72157626076005256/
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