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Game Hack-A-Thon Attracts Teams At 500+ Sites Worldwide
BarbaraHudson writes: Video game enthusiasts around the world participated in the Global Game Jam this past weekend. The event is a worldwide 48-hour hack-a-thon dedicated to inspiring creativity and building a working game from scratch in one weekend. Sponsored by companies like Intel, Microsoft, and Facebook, it's the largest event of its kind.
All games entered for GGJ are released under a Creative Commons share, alter, no sell license. You can browse through the games and download their source files on the official website, and a couple of publications did quick hands-on playthroughs.
"Although the club is focused on game development, not everyone participating was a computer programmer. Artists and graphic designers were present to help create characters and models for the games. The goal of Global Game Jam is to a stir up a global creative buzz in games while at the same time exploring the process of development."
All games entered for GGJ are released under a Creative Commons share, alter, no sell license. You can browse through the games and download their source files on the official website, and a couple of publications did quick hands-on playthroughs.
"Although the club is focused on game development, not everyone participating was a computer programmer. Artists and graphic designers were present to help create characters and models for the games. The goal of Global Game Jam is to a stir up a global creative buzz in games while at the same time exploring the process of development."
Slashdot should have posted about it before it happened.
To some people, having the engine is liberating and allows them far more creativity. If you're someone who has an amazing story to tell and an interesting idea for a game, but have very little programming experience, being able to bring your grand vision into existence is going to be a lot more difficult and may prevent some from even trying. We're not telling budding authors to construct their own typewriter and build their own press after all.
At the same time, engine design itself is certainly important, but it's a different kind of creativity. It won't appeal to everyone, but I've found that showing people a basic engine and discussing enhancements or improvements is a good way to get them more interested. If you have a simple engine and let them run into the limitations, they might feel compelled to put in the effort to poke around at the engine itself whereas if you had them start from scratch it might be overwhelming.
Part of the learning process is giving people education in manageable chunks. Obviously there are some who can handle more than others, but even the most brilliant and diligent of students can be overwhelmed.