Game Jam 2012

This year I attended the Global Game Jam for the first time. Several off my colleagues attended this event last year and really enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to coming along to this one and getting stuck in. This year, the Irish chapter was held in Griffith College Dublin. The idea of the Game Jams is that you have 48 hours to create a game from scratch. There is a general theme set and them you have as much freedom to interperate and use it as you wish. There are no rules in this regard, so this results in a huge number of different games produced by the Jams participants. This year, the theme set was Ouroboros, which is the ancient Greek symbol of a snake eating its own tail. The participants then form teams on their own and you work on it over a weekend. On the Sunday the game is then submitted and added to the Game Jam website. I formed a small team with some colleagues from my masters course and we laboured to create a simple game which we named OuroGerrup.

Our game was built in Unity, 3DS Max and of course Photoshop. In the game, the player controls a small sailing ship, and you much chase down a sea serpent (our connection with Ouroboros) blasting it with your cannon. The old Playstation game Overboard served as some initial inspiration. We had originally planned to make 3D models of the serpent, but due to time constraints, abandoned this idea and came up with a humorous but acceptable compromise which can be seen there. There were a few bugs in the game and it was ridiculously hard to actually win, however for a 48 hour effort I think its pretty good!

While I was initially a little disappointed in the set up for the Jam, the room we were in was pretty run down, the pizzas were pretty nasty and the somewhat lacklustre goodie bag (I'm not one for complaining about free stuff but this was ridiculous) I soon relaxed a little and got a little more into it. Once we had a plan out small team managed to get the game ready in time and to our own satisfaction considering the time we had available. The Game Jam 2012 was an interesting and enjoyable experience and I look forward to the next one!