Imma doing a game jam: 2012 Indie Speed Run

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What is a Game Jam?A group of people getting together to produce a game in a short amount of time. How short? Like 48 hours, usually, as we all have lives after Red Bull and Coffee. It’s hard enough to make a game, the time limit’s just the cherry on top of the sundae of difficulty. It’s an exercise in cleverness, creativity and pure unadulterated tenacity.

Indie Speed Run is a new concept in Game Jamming where you as an individual or a team is/are given exactly 48 hours to jam a game. Whereas most limited time jam comps are loosely timed with a single deadline, this one has a cool system that ensures that your game IS original AND completed within 48 hours. Usually jams are just for fun and experience (though many a famous game had their roots in game jams), but this one has a pot - a cool $2,500 for the winner. Also the opportunity to get your game/name in front of their panel of infamous judges (Creators of Monkey Island, Minecraft, Baldur’s Gate, Limbo, Journey, Zero Punctuation) is just awesome.

How it works (ingenious)

  • Go to the site, register yourself and your team
  • When you’re ready, hit the start button
  • The site gives you a few random elements that you MUST use in your game (to ensure it’s a jam game and not something from your closet)
  • A timer starts, you have 48 hours to submit your game.
  • GO!

Going with a plan

For this, I’m teaming up with another member of makegamesSA to do a speed run and make a game. 48 hours is not a lot of time to create something awesome, so we’ve got to go in with a plan:
  • Book out a weekend - so that we know we have 48 straight hours to concentrate on one thing.
  • Start the 48 hours fresh - we’ll wake up, hit the start button and go, instead of meeting up one evening and hitting the start button and immediately be tired already.
  • Don’t go into zombie mode - while it’s tempting to not sleep for 48 hours, being zombified simply isn’t productive. We’ll sleep  4 hours or so at a time, enough to get us going again.
  • Be prepared - I’m going to do a few other bits of preparation to make sure we get as much out of this jam as possible! Here is an article all about that, and I’m going to document my preparations in future posts too.

So if you’re interested check it out! Join us for a Jam! http://www.indiespeedrun.com/