Hey guys, I know it's been forever since I was here, but life was horrendously busy that I barely had time to do what I love most (web coding, game making).
Things are getting better, but enough about me...
Global Game Jam 2010 is almost upon us! January 29-31
What is it you may ask? Well, Jammers are given a set of constraints, and 48 hours to make a game. Simple enough. Cool part about this is that you get to meet people who are there, well, to do the very same thing.
First, everyone gets time to brainstorm an idea based on constraints, then you get to pitch your idea to the crowd. Whoever likes your idea, can join the team and more design goes on from there.
Teams generally help each other out, like at my location, there were only a few were able to help with music and audio, so we shared our skills.
Every location has a webcam to broadcast the madness, including the crappy music I rushed together which got hilarious comments from the people viewing the webcast...
Global Game Jam 2009 was the first ever, and was insanely fun. I highly recommend anyone interested in game design and such to go... Global, means Global. Chances are, there's a location near you, or if you have the means, you can start your own Jam location via the site.
I'm posting this here because I was discussing with a friend GGJ2010 and we realized we spent more time programming something in XNA than actually working on the game... So we both having used Construct before figured we'd use it. There are no restrictions on what you use to make a game, just that it was made during the 48 hours.
The top game (in polish and completeness) was recently released on the Android market as a free download: Lucid and I'll link to the Game Jam release. http://globalgamejam.org/games/lucid-0
My team's game was... well, I'll let you decide for yourself... (spacebar to pass through the initial cutscene) http://globalgamejam.org/games/materialism-98ms2
We had great ideas, but the fact that we tried to do 3d, and wasted so much time on coding, we didn't have time to make a game...
I'll be at the same NYU location this year, hopefully I'll see some of you guys participate in one of these... Just wave at the camera or something XD...
And have fun! Canada rickrolled everyone on their stream, and other places did funny things as well. Sure, the top teams may get a few tickets to go show off their game at GDC.