So this weekend I ran a game jam in my local city. I’d been to 3 gamejams before this and had loved the experience, so wanted to bring something similar to my area and give local devs and students the same opportunity to build cool stuff in no time at all.

I booked out the room after much decision about when to host it and where, only running the event for a 12 hour stretch as a pilot to see how it went.

First thing’s first, for the most part organising the event was a lot easier than I anticipated. With the exception of hunting down candidates for the event initially, the planning was reasonably painless, only needing to choose a venue, get some chargers and decide on a theme. Setup took no more than an hour and once the teams got going things went smooth.

I have to say that when I originally considered running the game jam, three main fears plagued my mind building up to the event:

1. A 12 hour game jam (actually 11 hour since we stopped work an hour early to present), I was a little concerned that we could run out of time and be stuck with nothing, teams still staggering out of the planning stage.

2. The team experience of many of the students had been given the entire academic year to construct a product, so I was worried how they would adapt to the time constraints.

3. Proportional numbers between different team members - throughout the signup process the numbers between the different types of people attending the event was in massive fluctuation. I was defintely concerned that there would be people groupless or sat waiting around for things to do.

These fears were blown away when the event day came.

Whilst I’d expected originally around 10 to 15 people to turn up, we got closer to 30.

The theme we chose, announced bang on 9am was Ghosts, chosen from a tombola based on everyone’s requests. After some confusion attempting to organise the groups, the teams each got their ideas fleshed out and set in motion. Whilst we were in the intial planning stage, others arrived and a new team was formed from the later arrivals.

With the late arrivals came an unusual role I expected to see at the event - voice actor Kathryn MacColl, who produced audio for our game, Get Out. Definitely an underlooked area when it comes to game jams as her contribution really gave our game, “Get Out” that extra layer of depth.

On subject of audio, the addition of 8 sound guys on the day gave each of the projects mood and tremendous immersion. Anyone organising a game jam in the future I would suggest ensuring that you get as many sound designers involved as possible.

As things to improve, here is what I’ve learnt from running the event:

1. Organising game jams are nowhere near as stressful as you’d think.

2. Running the event on a sunday spells trouble for anyone coming from outside of the local area.

3. 12 hour game jams are possible and are even more effective at getting people squeezing every last drop out of their time.

4. The collaboration between the different areas of expertise is a fantastic thing.

5. Doing the vote for the games the night before saves a significant amount of time on the day.

I’ll be putting up more information about the people and teams that turned up to the event in the coming days, along with footage of the games and the event itself!