LTGameJam 2009 postmortem

So LTGameJam 2009 is over. I’ve been there as part organizer, part participant, so my views are both biased and incomplete (being an organizer means you have to run around a bit, instead of just focusing on making the game).

The theme for the games was “as long as we have each other, we will never run out of problems”. Additionally, games had to be short (5 minutes of play or less), and somehow incorporate one of “affectionate”, “patriotic” or “missing” words.

I worked on a Missing Peace game. It’s nothing really fancy, does not quite follow the idea and incorporates the above mentioned words in a cheap way (“just stick it into a title! haha!"). It was probably the most polished game from all games made there though (for some definition of polish)… too bad it’s not actually fun to play :)

Oh well. I just did not have any interesting ideas, and wasn’t particularly inspired, so there is the result. Probably burnout of trying to finish Unity 2.5 at work had it’s toll as well.

Overall, the good parts about this game jam:

• It was fun (hey, that’s the whole idea)

• Some very positive progress, compared to LTGameJams 2002/2003: more people (20-25, up from 10-15), much better proportion of artists (about 30%, up from almost zero), more people who don’t know each other, more games made by folks outside of nesnausk! group :)

• Some of the ideas that were brainstormed have interesting bits.

• Did I mention it was fun?

On the downside, I get the feeling that the games made this time were not crazy enough. GameJams are meant to generate totally whacky, crazy and amazing ideas; however this time most of the games were known game mechanics, pretty safe idea and so on. Have to improve on that the next time.

So that’s about it!