Coding Games In 48 Hours 99
The Opposable Thumbs blog covers a 48-hour-long "game jam" at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Twenty teams of game developers — 16 indie and four professional — compete over a weekend to build a functional game based on a few deliberately vague keywords. This article documents the brainstorming sessions and the early prototyping work. Quoting:
"The teams become less talkative as midnight draws near and the individual team members all settle down into their jobs. Everybody seems determined to not let sleep take over just yet. I take a tour of some of the other teams. Badgers are being animated, leg movements first with static bodies above them. Other teams have no art yet and just use colored rectangles as they get the mechanics down. Others are still sketching beautiful concept art and coding level editors.'To move around the room is to hear random snippets of creativity and math. 'If we move the z-axis, too, we can do this thing' or 'what if we procedurally generated that object.' In this one spot, sixteen games are coming into being that weren't even concepts eight hours ago."
Re:Interesting contest (Score:4, Interesting)
They seem to still exist [scene.org]
Re:48 hours (Score:4, Interesting)
Generally gameplay ideas that requires vast amounts of time to implement are usually not very good ones. Most good games have really simple gameplay at their core.
Newgrounds (Score:4, Interesting)
I play games on Newgrounds sometimes. They often have game jams where games are created within so many hours. These games often go to the frontpage.
My experience with this: Usually these games are of lower quality. Often it is a good and original idea, but the implementation is lacking.
I prefer games made by someone with love and with all the time needed to polish it properly :)