Global Game Jam 2014 : St. Louis, MO

From January 24th at 6:00pm to January 26th at 4:00pm, game designers and hobbyists from all around the world came together and made over 4,000 games in under 48 hours! That's A LOT of games!!! I attended in the Global Game Jam at the University of Missouri St. Louis, where around 200 people participated in the global event. Just in St. Louis alone, 28 games were created. Plus, participants were provided t-shirts, snacks, drinks, and even dinner.

I arrived at the UMSL(University of Missouri St. Louis) campus around 3:45pm, and waited in line for almost 20 minutes just to sign in. Each jammer received colored stickers that corrosponded with their role. The stickers I chose were black and blue. Black for design, blue for programming and writing. Sheets were handed out with instructions and "diversifiers". Diversifiers are voluntary constraints to put on the design. Some diversifiers included: Back to the 1885, Can you Come and Play?, Honor Aaron Swartz, Rebels Learn it Better, and Hackontroller. After the 6pm keynote, when the theme "Things are not as they are, they are as you are" was announced, brainstorming groups were created.  

After the brainstorming, groups began to form. I decided, as a personal challenge, to do a project of my own. I chose to make an FPS(First Person Shooter) for the PC and Mac, that can be played in the web browser. The game is called Dark Saga. I learned a lot during the development process, and made quite a few mistakes. I honestly think I spent more time breaking and fixing the game than I did actually designing it! One of the biggest problems I had was with the network programming. It took me about 4 hours to get all the networking issues worked out, so much time wasted!

One of the most valuable lessons I learned during the jam was that i should make full backups of my project before making any big changes, because sometimes unity crashes...and when it does it can really screw up the code. Despite all my struggles, I did complete a working online multiplayer demo of the game. Which can be found at The Global Game Jam website. Enjoy!