The Global Game Jam has Begun!

The Madison site has two teams moving ahead. Check out the live stream in one of the rooms on the Global Game Jam’s site.

Gaydos edit: Expect pictures soon

H1N1

The Saturday theme was H1N1, and the jammers created a number of games designed to keep people healthy. From a pedometer-based health race to a game of life in diseased times, we spread the joy of play throughout the first floor of TEB.

Flashlight Tag!

The first jam of the season was “Flashlight Tag”, which surprisingly did not leave any participants with injuries due to running around in the dark. It did, however, involve deception, balls, cards, and perhaps a lightbulb fatality. And a few new participants––welcome!

Welcome Back!

For starters, welcome back for the 2009/2010 academic year, glad to see you all returning for another year of game design.

We’ll be holding jams on a different schedule than last semester to accommodate the flash/action(Flaction)script class. We’ll be meeting on the first saturday from 1pm -3pm and third thursday from 430-630 of every month starting this week! This thursday, a post-game jam, GLS social will also happen.

-Matt

No Jam this week

The end of the semester = busy game designers. There’s no game design jam this weekend. Instead, take a look at Applied Game Design’s comments on game design documents.

Go fish yourself.

Unfortunately, video evidence is not available for this past week’s game jam, so I’ll be writing a play-by-play instead. I know, I know, it’s not the same but really, you just need to attend  : )  these post-hoc write ups just don’t do justice.

Instead of following our previous format of: picking a topic, brainstorming, and jamming for a hour, we shook this past week’s jam up, mixed it with a spoon, and served it on a bagel. First, everyone played go fish … or at least tried to remember what the rules were since most of us haven’t tried playing since we were 10 years old. Once we all agreed on a set of rules, everyone broke into groups or worked alone in order to design a variant of go fish - they used the rules as a basis for a game. The results? Slightly too graphic to post verbatim. Whoops.

Here’s the breakdown in the order played:

Suzanne & Sarah: Zombies & Pirates. Pillaging, Brains, head-wounds and booty.

Damiana & Brendan: Fish your neighbors. Take their stuff. In addition to getting “resources” you might also get “pollution.” Four resources and you’ve scored, but four pollution and your country’s in for a natural disaster. Better keep an eye out for “green” aces to clean up your stuff!

Matt: Library edutainment. Collect one of each resource before you’re bored to death!

Kevin: Ryan Martinez presents “courtship”

Ryan: Kevin Harris

(We can only guess why Kevin and Ryan made games named after each other. Who knew they were best of friends?)

Back on this week

After nearly a month with no game jamming, we will be back on April 25th. See you in 138!

Pac-Man

Pac Man was this week’s theme and man, what a throwback to classic gaming. The three games that were made this week were not only fun, but even added a new level of mayhem to our usual antics. Check out some pictures below as well as an awesome post by Sean in the games section.

Travel

This past week’s game design jam was not only the most highly attended, but also produced some of the best games to date. Applying the “travel” theme, games ranged from artifact stealing (or purchasing!)  mayhem throughout the building to table top road trips with murderous hitch hiking college students, it was creative, exhausting, and as always,  a great time.

See pictures and a reminder about this coming jam’s changed location below…

March 14th Game Jam

We’re changing locations for the March 14th game jam. We’ll be at the Memorial Union with a minimal amount of supplies. See you there!