The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
8:32am on Monday, 27th January, 2025:
Anecdote
It was the Global Game Jam over the weekend, with participants asked to create games on the theme of "bubble". It's not a great theme, because there are two or three obvious ideas that it sparks and then not a whole lot more. This is what comes of having themes decided by a committee.
We had more people doing the GGJ at Essex than we usually do, which is good. I was there at the start, giving my talk about the time I myself was on the GGJ theme committee and thus why deciding themes by committee produces anodyne results. I then reappeared yesterday for the post-submission presentations.
It turned out that I was the only member of staff present yesterday. My colleague, who was running the event, couldn't make it (although I didn't know that at the time). The schedule said that it finished at 5pm then there would be presentations at 6pm; I had thought the presentations were at 5pm and ended at 6pm, but had apparently been misinformed. Fortunately, the Essex participants spent the hour from 5pm to 6pm looking at each other's creations, so come 6pm they already knew what everyone had done. None of them wanted to give or to listen to presentations, which is probably just as well given that the PC connected to the projector admitted no method of accepting a memory stick with a presentation on it.
At the point when everyone was preparing to go, I figured I should give a rousing "thanks for coming, I hope you enjoyed it, great work everyone!" speech, but as it happened I was beaten to it by one of the participants (I think he may be head of the university's Game Dev Society — I can see why he would be, anyway). That saved me from having to pretend I'd seen what was going on over the weekend.
There were some pretty good entries, as it happens, especially given that teams had only two to four members and no artists, and most of them decided to use the GGJ to try to learn something new (such as Unreal Engine — we teach Unity at Essex). Some games did share eerily-similar mechanics, but that's what happens when you have "bubble" as a theme. I told them they should have just made the game they wanted and put a cat called Bubble in the background somewhere.
Random entries from Essex are shown on https://globalgamejam.org/jam-sites/2025/uoessexggj2025.
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).