As the coordinator for the GAMBIT-hosted site of the Global Game Jam, I am soooo happy I get to close things down at midnight. Yay for sleep and showers!
We'll have a few videos up tomorrow, but you can check out our live webcam, twitter feeds, and all that other real-time goodness that powers the web these days on our main Global Game Jam site.
Today, we had the keynote at 5pm sharp by Ste Curran from One Life Left. It was funny and inspirational - it definitely set the right mood for the game jam. Here's the full keynote via theGlobal Game Jam's Youtube Channel.
After the keynote, we gave the teams they're mandatory criteria: the global theme, the local theme, and the constraints.
The theme for all of the sites of the Global Game Jam is REDACTED (sorry - I'll post the theme once all the other global sites get it). The local theme that Doris Rusch and I picked out for our site is 'abstraction,' specifically, that any visual elements shouldn't be directly representational of anything. The constraints for our time zone were: RAIN, PLAIN, and SPAIN. Each game had to use one element from that list.
The Jammers had an hour and a half to mull these things over while they ate pizza (the food of game jam champions!). Some thought about it on their own, some formed small groups, but by the end, we had 28 ideas pitched. After the pitch process, the Jammers started placing themselves on teams. By 8PM, after a little ca-jiggering of the teams (making sure each had enough programmers and artists to get the job done) we ended up with 8 teams working on 8 games. I'll fill in about the chosen games later on, but here's a list of the ideas that didn't make the cut (just the one-line descriptions: the full video will be available tomorrow):
- Alien Language Cellphone
- House of Mirrors
- Dressing Up Words/Sentences
- It Rains Forever
- Language Spheres
- Emotion Blocks
- Don Quixote
- Driving Through Rain
- Rain Man
- Zooming Moorish Architecture Game
- Raindrop
- Plain (the 3D FPS)
- Interactive Poem
- Pablo... Picasso!
- Fire vs Rain
- Can You Paint with all the Colors of the Rain
- Raining Lies
- Paint
- Footsteps
- My Fair Lady
This list is definitely not descriptive enough for to understand the range of ideas and creativity on display. Hopefully the video tomorrow will fill in the blanks.
As I write this, the Jammers have one and a half hours left to work today. They're all set up in lab spaces at their workstations hammering away on some amazing game designs. GAMBIT video-wunderkind Generoso Fierro will be interviewing a few of the Jammers tomorrow and we'll post these videos as soon as we can.
Two days left. I can't wait to play these games!!
