Game jam colloquium

This is a page for the 2025-01-27 Game Jamming Colloquium, hosted by Alessia, Senka and Thijs. During this colloquium, we'll team up in small groups to make a whole game in just one morning! That might sound scary, but game jams are all about experiecing the process of creation: any result is good, whether that be a playable game, an idea you thought about, or fun you've had :)

On this page, we'll provide the schedule, some examples, and potentially a documentation of the games created during the session.

Schedule

10.00–10.15: The academic quarter
10.15–10.45: Intro and examples, talking a bit about how this relates to our own separate researches
10.45–11.00: Think and talk about game you want to make in duos or groups of 3, and pick jam theme together
11.00–12.00: Game jam
Making games with tools and methods of your choice
12.00–12.10: Break
12.10–13.00: Playing the games we made

What is a game jam?

• Making a game with others from scratch
• Focus is not on creating a 'good game', but on flexing your creative muscles, generating ideas, trying out new tools and having fun
• Collaborating between artists, game developers, writers, designers, musicians, coders, you name it!

History of game jams on Wikipedia

There's many places that host jams -- and you can host one yourself! A big hosting place is itch.io, where a million jams are running at any given moment:

Game Jam Prompts

We will each submit one prompt, and pick one at random as the theme for this jam! Here's some to get the ball rolling:

• Sleeplessness in the age of productivity
• ...

Examples

There are a million examples to show. Some really famous games are the results of game jams, like Hollow Knight (jam game from LD27) and Celeste (PICO8 jam entry). THere's also a million different types of jams, differing in length, team composition, desired outcome, tools used, ... For this session, we want to encourage you to use anything you want, to bend familiar tools to make a game with them, and to not feel restricted in what a 'game' is. Below are some examples using different tools, and taking different shapes.

I dreamed

By Alessia! A game made with the Bitsy engine. Play it here.

Queers in Love at the End of the World

By Anna Anthropy. A web-based CYOA game in which every playthrough lasts 10 seconds. Play it here. This game was created for the 2013 Ludum Dare 27 game jam, which had the theme '10 seconds'. It's made with Twine, a free an open source tool for creating branching narratives. Options for .js and css styling, and exports to HTML!

Choose your own adventure passports

Choose your own adventure passports game made with paper.
The player is always trans, and gets stopped by passport security because they do not look like their passport photo, in an attempt to resolve this they end up travelling through time instead of space, with the possibility of shifting passports and going to different eras.

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The Robot Assembly Line and Social Performance Testing Facility

Thijs's 'game' for the public moment! It is a 'human game', like the Git exercise from last year, resulting in something performative. There was an instruction form, and a physical assembly line to move through.

Application form (click for the full 6-page document)

Adventure.pptx

An interactive adventure, made entirely in powerPoint
itch.io
gamethrough on youtube

supermarket madness

Alessia's first try with Scratch
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1048095490/

Example 'Tools' to Use

Really, anything works! But if you're stuck, here's some suggestions:

• This wiki!
• Any materials lying on your studio desk right now
• Ctrl+P to print a webpage
• The elevators
• The water outside and the animals in it
• A game you already know
• Your favorite typesetting software
• Videorecordings of yourselves
• ...

Example Questions to Think About

• If your own project features / would benefit from some form of interactivity, how so? Feel encouraged to use this moment to explore such an idea!
• Will your game be played by one person? Two? A group? No persons?
• ...

Documentation Playground?

(Here we can add documentation of the games made during this colloquium!)

Xpub Carol
Game in an Hour