Seattle Indies’ Biggest Game Jam Yet
It’s a rainy Friday night in Seattle. It’s the wettest month on record. Everyone should be at home, warm and dry, lounging in bed, and celebrating the end of a long week. But instead, we’ve all sloshed across the city, congregating at Pacific Science Center. More than 200 of us sit in the IMAX theater, eagerly ready to start Global Game Jam 2020.
The Global Game Jam is the biggest game jam in the world, with game developers from all across the world: from Cairo to Curitiba, from Paris to Shanghai, from Atlanta to Seattle.
And all the jammers all across the globe are given the same challenge: Make a game in 48 hours that invokes our secret theme. For 2020, the secret theme of the Global Game Jam was “repair.”
After hearing the secret theme, we start brainstorming game ideas. What if you were a medieval witch doctor who must diagnose curses and prescribe potions? What if you were a clumsy security guard at a museum who accidentally broke the art pieces?
Over dinner, we trade game ideas, slowly remixing and pivoting our designs. We meet with other jammers. Some of them are folks we’ve jammed with before, and some are folks we only just met.
When jammers share an interest in a game idea, they join together as a team. One such team rallies behind a j-pop magical girl rhythm game.
“What really solidified it was that we all really like anime!” shares Sam. “As soon as we learned that about each other, there was only one conclusion: we have to make some kind of anime game together.”
“This is a sentiment we shared: to make this a celebration of what we love.” shares DM Liao. Excited and energized by their big ideas, the team begins building their game.
SATURDAY
It’s a foggy Saturday morning in Seattle. It’s so foggy that you can’t see the Space Needle, even when you’re standing underneath it. A lot of jammers are already awake, fueled by creativity and a lot of coffee.
Pacific Science Center has been the home of our game jams for years. The museum houses everything from animatronic dinosaurs to inter-galactic planetariums, each in their own exhibit. And during the game jam, we become another exhibit: gaggles of game developers frantically engineering and exploring their art.
“Game jams really get at the heart of PacSci’s mission: igniting curiosity in every one of us. We are proud to host this community of innovators and inspire our guests through the process.” — Lauren Slettedahl, PacSci
One gaggle of game developers has 10 people sitting around one table. During the opening kickoff, they were strongly encouraged to not have more than 7 jammers on their team, but they’re embracing the risk of having a huge team.
“It’s taken a lot of organizational energy and communication skills.” says Kore, one of the two game designers on the team. “The hardest part is getting everyone on the same page.”
The game is a split-screen multiplayer game, where you race against the other player to collect resources and repair your mech in the center of this massive post-apocalyptic crater.
SUNDAY
It’s a bright brisk Sunday morning in Seattle. The sun has finally come out. There are only a few hours left before the deadline, so most jammers are heads-down on their games.
One jam team is already done. And that’s because they’ve been jamming in a completely different timezone! It’s a cross-site collaboration between jammers here in Seattle, and jammers in Galway, Ireland.
“It’s actually been pretty awesome. Because of the 8 hour time difference, we have an undisrupted 48 hours of work.” says Matt, one of the developers on the project. “When your other coder goes to sleep, you have the codebase all to yourself.” They communicated extensively through Discord.
“This collaboration brings the global to the Global Game Jam.” says Andrew, the site organizer for Seattle. “It’s been great working with Galway, and I hope we can do it again next year!!”
It’s 4:59pm, the deadline for submitting your game. We all rush to compile and upload our games. We all grab some more pizza.
During the final presentations, we each get a chance to show off our game, and talk about the development process. The jammers from Juice Squad Games share their goals for the jam:
“[Our previous jam game] was a lot of content for one moment, and something very early we decided was to make very few things that could provide a lot of moments. Everything was modular: I built all the stuff to be easy for level design, to drag-and-drop it all in the scene with no breakable prefab references.”
The final presentations runs for more than 2 hours, with over 50 games. We all applaud and cheer for each game, and all the hard work they put into it.
And with that, the Global Game Jam is over. After a long long weekend, we made a game! We all head home, triumphant but exhausted, to get some well-deserved rest.
This has been our biggest game jam yet, with over 250+ jammers from Seattle Indies and AIE Seattle, many of them participating in their first game jam ever. We strive to form a community of open and inclusive game developers here in Seattle.
“The Global Game Jam is always a really nice event because there’s a spirit of camaraderie, it’s not about seeing who can make the best game, but just working with other people. It’s a great experience.” — Sam Lee
If you are interested in joining our open and inclusive community, we run events weekly, monthly and quarterly. From co-working sessions to showcases, social gatherings and Seattle Indies Expo it is a great way to find team members, get feedback on and showcase your work and we hope you will join us in person or on Discord!
We are returning to Pacific Science Center on February 22nd to showcase the games from the Global Game Jam. If you are interested in exploring local indie games, be sure to swing by! We’d love to see you there!!
Photography by Daniel Craig Beebe; thanks for capturing the event!!
