The Global Game Jam is the biggest event of its kind in the whole wide world. Scotland has been at the forefront of the GGJ for the last several years thanks to the team at Glasgow Caledonian University, who have supported it and helped it grow into one of the largest and most active locations in the world.
This year’s Game Jam takes place on January 24th-26th.
If you’re not familiar with the Game Jam principle, it’s simple. Artists, programmers, designers and games creators of all kinds – students, professionals, part-timers and amateurs, get together and create a game, non-stop, over the course of 48 hours. It’s a high intensity way of building games, which can throw up fantastic ideas, incredible innovation and some very strange ideas.
To help focus the jam participants, every year the Game Jam offers a number of ‘themes’ or concepts which games can incorporate. In 2013, one of the themes was simply the sound of a human heart beating. One of the winning games from the Scottish jam, Lub vs Dub went on to be commercially released and as we reported earlier this month, was chosen as Game Of The Week by Starbucks in North America in Canada in early January.
This year, the Scottish Game Jam has once again grown. The Glasgow Caledonian site has managed to accommodate 200 jammers, while it has been joined by another site, at Dundee’s Abertay University, giving jammers on the east coast the chance to join the event and make Scotland one of the largest and most active jam sites in the global competition.
The popularity of the jam means that space has been vanishing almost as soon as registrations opened and the jam is already at full capacity.
Because the game jam is worldwide in scope, it pulls in some of the world’s biggest developers and creators as advisors, mentors and judges. The keynote speakers for the 2013 jam are:
- Jenova Chen (co-founder and president of That Game Company)
- Kaho Abe (Computational Fashion Fellow at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center and the Artist in Residence at the Game Innovation Lab at NYU-Poly)
- Richard LeMarchand (Lead, Co-Lead Designer, Uncharted series, Naughty Dog & Associate Professor at University of Southern California)
The Scottish Game Jam receives a great deal of support from individuals, companies and organisations across the country. The 2014 event is being supported by
- Glasgow Caledonian University
- IGDA Scotland
- JP Morgan
- Creative Assembly
- Ludometrics
- Calm Down Tom
- XBL Gamerhub
You can find out more about the Global Game Jam on the event’s official web site. You can follow the Scottish Game Jam on the local website, on Facebook or Twitter.
And we’d like to mention Christina Little who created the new logo/poster for the 2014 event…
