Fall 2015 Game Jam Postmortem

01 October 2015 - Lee Anne

Overall, I think the game jam was a success. There were 16 participants and 4 teams entered their game at the end. There was one team of 4 at the start that didn’t return after the first day, so I don’t know why they decided to stop participating. But overall, there were a lot of cool ideas floating around and a lot of fun between the groups.

The facilities were actually quite adequate for the game jam. For Friday and Saturday, we stayed in Knoy 306, which had tables in the middle of the room that the participants could rearrange into what they needed for their group. On Sunday we had to move to Knoy 340 only because I worked in that lab during the game jam and I wasn’t going to be held responsible for anything the jammers did because I wasn’t there.
Despite this, everybody was having fun.

After everybody entered their game, we had a little showcase. There was a game where you played as a cell that ate other cells and grew bigger and bigger. Another game you played as an elderly person and had to fight off these robotic nurses that were trying to capture you.
The third game you played as the last human and had to fight off robots before they killed you. The last game, you played as a robot who found and fell in love with another robot and tried to escape a laboratory. It was really interesting seeing the different ideas that came out of the theme, which was Artificial Life.

Having semester game jams seems to be working on bringing the game development community together here at Purdue. I’ve met people from the different game dev clubs on campus, and even some that weren’t a part of those clubs. It’s really exciting to see the gaming culture as prevalent as it is on a campus that’s known for its STEM programs because that means the students are changing Purdue to accept game development. What we make moves the world forward.

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