IGI Community Jam #1 (January 2017) — A retrospective
Note: this article has been updated. Original publish date: April 12, 2017.
We held our first game jam! The IGI community team (consisting of Alexandra Bjarg, Haukur Steinn Logason, Torfi Asgeirsson and Jóhannes Sigurðsson) had come up with the idea for a IGI community game jam a while back. So we were very happy when we were able to get all the pieces together for a good jam, which took place January 6–8th, 2017 at Reykjavík University.
The theme of the jam was Polar Opposites.
In total, we had 40 people register for the jam. 14 games were made during the jam which was way more than we ever expected, and the variation between the games was astounding. Two teams made VR games, there were platformers, endless runners, top-down RPGs, first-person driving games and more.
We were, and still are, incredibly impressed with the work that each team put into their game and cannot thank our participants enough for making the jam into an amazing experience! You can check out all submissions (except one) on our itch.io page.
The jam started on Friday evening with a kick-off where participants could meet each other and mingle, some using that opportunity to get together a team of people to work with throughout the jam. Some teams started working right off the bat, while others held off until Saturday morning. We provided jammers with a room at Reykjavík University but there were no rules surrounding where people could work, so some teams took to working around the clock somewhere else while others stayed put at the university. Watching teams go from idea to execution was really quite something, especially considering how many games were being made at once in the same room and how different they were from each other.
Jammers then continued to work throughout all of Saturday and Sunday. We had set our submission deadline for 5 pm on Sunday which all teams miraculously were able to achieve! Following that, we had pizza and then a demo evening where each team were able to present and demo their game to each other.
Each team then voted for best game and in addition to that, we had a small panel of judges consisting of Reykjavík University professor David Thue and local indie game developers Marco Bancale and Jonatan Van Hove. The judges and participants’ votes agreed on the best game, which was Co-Driver by CodeMonkees. The team was presented with prizes on behalf of CCP Games and the first ever official ‘IGI Game Jam’! Again, congratulations to the team!
We wanted to learn a little bit more about our participants and how they felt about the jam, so we sent out a participant survey.
For 63% of our participants, IGI Jam #1 was the first ever game jam they took part in and for 30%, this was the first time they ever made a game!
47% of our participants are working in the games industry.
Overall, 70% of our participants were very satisfied with their experience and nobody was dissatisfied (yay, us!). However, we also got some great feedback on what to improve and some new ideas to try out for our future game jams. We have already begun working on them and trying some of them out (such as an online jam which we will write about soon).
We want to thank everyone who made this jam possible: IGI, Reykjavík University and CCP Games and last but certainly not least our talented and passionate jammers. We can’t wait to see you at our next jam!
