The GGJ24 post jam writeup

The Global Game Jam event went smoothly and with much enthusiasm (from your part!) this year. While it may not seem like a lot was changed since last run, this year I focused more efforts in improving some processes that take place in the background. Behind the scenes some new challenges were taken on and a few things were also improved upon.

Thanks again to Qgroup and Tarsier Studios for sponsoring our event, and to Game Habitat for their support and the venue! This year a total of 72 people participated and made 16 games altogether during the course of the weekend at our jam site location. The numbers in total for the Global Game Jam have yet to fully come out (I’ll edit them in here later), and this year’s theme was “Make Me Laugh”. We got a good increase of engagement since last year (where 58 participants made 14 games) 😀

Improvements

As always, we try to find ways to better the overall jam experience from how we do preparations, how we manage the event, and what we should consider for the next time we help organize the event.

Improvements this run

  • Instead of a pitch deck, we created a document with sponsor information. Both are good for different situations. The pitch deck is great when meeting with sponsors personally, while the document is useful for when the sponsor needs all the details laid out and ‘in writing’.
  • Had a schedule shoutout in our announcements channel, letting participants know what happens tomorrow.
  • Have a checklist for tasks during the jam. What I did was dedicate a todo app on my phone for just that. It worked really well!
  • The registration spreadsheet gets two more sheets for post-jam processing:
  • One for checking the status of the games (a little more on this later), and
  • Confirming who submitted games, and from those who didn’t, a column displaying their Discord handle.

For next time we should…

  • Have better signage (like the extra bits at the door, the check-in sign should transform into Team MJT).
  • Shift the check-in desk perpendicular to the door to avoid the pull-at-door behavior.
  • Have check-in notes for quick information that’s legible for those entering.
  • Should mention things like toilet access and logistics better during presentation and as an announcement.
  • Only mention instructions for uploading in the presentation; try to cut the time as much as possible.
  • Dedicate activity time for stretching and a break or two.
Expand to see my (Torsten’s) self-reflection

Self-reflection

So my self-reflection from last year still stands, but some of the details have slightly changed and maybe a little bit of the approach (for reference, it’s at https://www.malmojamstoo.com/2023/02/12/the-ggj23-post-jam-writeup/).

“Information towards newcomers”, where I felt that there should be the least amount of friction for participating as a beginner/novice. What I suggested back then was the use of documentation, in the form of the GGJ game jam reference manual and the start of our own wiki. While it was super beneficial at that time and still serves a purpose for me as an organizer, one drawback became super apparent with documentation: they may become dated. The website had an overhaul (and therefore the game submission process changed) so the wiki’s information and it’s visuals became pretty useless for participants this year.

My new solution then is to prepare such directions to load in (i.e. copy in) as announcements instead. What I will do on top of this is to prepare some evergreen copy that outlines what’s important, which should allow me to prepare faster with the reuse of these announcements towards future jams as well.

For the “Post write-ups should maybe include feedback”, I find that doing about 20 of them is OK. I stated previously that a selection is made by request or by free choice if there are too many submissions, but I can imagine getting a fellow mentor (i.e. volunteer) in to split the work may also be a possibility.

Finally, for “A check-in and a system to help manage users”, all of it remains as it was. I’m still adamant about creating some kind of in-house system that automates most of the work. Now I remade the registration spreadsheet quite a bit last year and focused on ease of use, which allowed me some reprieve this year when getting into it, and cut my time agonizing over check-ins by up to a third, spending about 8-9 hours instead of the 12 from last year.

I mentioned JamHost last year, which renamed to EventHost. At least the domain redirects accordingly, but it feels slightly unreliable having to depend on an online service, which is why an in-house system will work better. One of the sponsors for GGJ this year is Jammio, a Discord bot that is more in line with what I was thinking of in terms of a solution. But in a way, this isn’t it either. I use our custom made Discord bot MJTBot to export the userlist and to demote users of a certain role. And for the most part, that’s all I want a Discord bot to do regarding the management of the event. There’s of course some features missing; automated announcements, promotion of roles based on a list, time-tracking of the event, maybe the ability to parrot certain pinned announcements, to name a few. On the other hand, I still prefer a web-based UI for users to interface. Both for things like group formations (for example), and for me as an organizer to perform and generate results with. And part of this reasoning is because this data may end up as published and easily accessible later. It also clearly simplifies user interaction if all the information they need can come from this supposed webapp and not split between their browser and a Discord bot. The data itself is mostly from the internet, from Google Forms and the GGJ website (in this case), and it can be transformed there instead without having to find ways to input that data. Furthermore not everyone needs to be reliant on Discord communications if it’s all online via the user’s choice of browser—at least, this is what I hope for in future.

Personal biometrics

In continuation of last year’s collection of data, I would like to add this data to compare and evaluate. I took 6868, 11340, and 11283 steps on each respective day of the event. I slept only very slightly better if not about the same as last year. And in a way, that sums up the experience while awake as well ~

Heartrate vs Sleep graphs
Note that the points on these graphs show the same date in order to overlap. The labels denote what day it is instead.

tl;dr on the Self-reflection above—Prep more for the announcements beforehand, and I still feel like my main assessments from last year’s evaluation stand true (even if I may have to adjust how I should tackle certain situations.

Other stuff worth mentioning

One new thing I experienced this year was that the usual haunts where I put up posters (e.g. Malmö University’s Niagara and Orkanen) have a policy of one poster that’s relevant for the students and has the date on it. I checked on them and they stayed for their intended duration, though I am unsure how effective they really are. I did pass out posters towards The Game Assembly with the help of Ylva, who kindly received me at the door, and I believe it’s good to find ways to connect more than once with places to ensure they know about the event and to remind others.

One of the new spreadsheet sheets that track the status of the game submissions.

So I added two new spreadsheet sheets for tracking game submissions and finalizing check-ins by submissions. This provided an unexpected insight that gave me pause. Some context. During the presentation at the start, I usually emphasize the importance of providing the source files above all else. However the red columns above are what’s most important to the game submission. In one zip file that comprises of: the source code, the license (by default it should be CC-BY-SA, but I suppose anything even more permitting works), and instructions on how to get the game submission working. As you see, only two-thirds managed to share their source code, and one-third included their licenses. Really only one group provided direct instructions on how to get the game running (the other two are tabletop submissions). It struck me that the game submissions do not have clear enough instructions from GGJ itself, and I believe this should also partially be resolved technically.

Since the engines for these game submissions have been consistently chosen for the most part, the instructions for getting someone to run it from source could be generated automatically and bundled together with the source files. And that applies likewise to the license file; if it can not be detected in the root of the zip file, bundle it together automatically with the source files and/or alert the user that it is missing. My thinking is that the license bit (at least) can be done on the off-season of the GGJ event if it’s too resource intensive to do so during the event.

I did note that GGJ has streamlined the start of the game submission process, so maybe this is in the works for the future. For now I plan to be a lot more concise and exacting with what’s needed in order to pass my final check on the game submissions at my end.

Oh, I was also able to blast my way through my own presentation before the keynote+theme reveal. From what I thought would be 20min tops down to half that, at 10min. I think 10min is a good amount of time for our intro, so in future jams it would be good to cut a lot of unnecessary information out and relay those into the announcements instead.

And that’s it! This concludes the assessment for my experience at Global Game Jam 2024. I hope you enjoyed the jam experience at this event, or if you are interested in attending in future, I hope we meet at something like this. The participants make the jam event fun. So thank you for keeping interest and I will see you around.

It’s not over yet though. What follows are the award titles, the game submissions (and my feedback on them), and some other details. Read on for more 🙂

Award titles

  • Allnighters was awarded “Chaos Simulator 2024” for See Gull – Agnes H., Jasper P., Liam S., Jonas H., Herman S., Anna S., Frederik B.
  • Sleezy Lampshade was awarded “And the last laugh” for The Last Jest – Sofia M., Aline S., Henrietta S., Domenico F., Robin A., Alborz G., Frans W.
  • Backsies was awarded “Assimilation failed successfully” for Chuckle cam – Henrik H., Felix K., Victor J.
  • Stressball Interactive was awarded “Outside In, squish squish” for Say The Line – Mina M., Tilde P., Jonathan M., Vanessa G., Hannes W., Linus P., Mattias L.
  • Epic Trumpet Interactive was awarded “Meowsical Magic” for Epic Trumpet Simulator – Kasper B., Anton E., Rasmus B., Océane N., Kasparas E.
  • SteamBootleg Studios was awarded “Most contemporary” for Sinking About Willie – Karl J., Bazo M., Marco Z., Ove Ø., Gabbriel O., Luna H.
  • Group 7 was awarded “Ba. Ba. Baa!” for Trago(at)s – Bianca T., Martin A., Sam B., Kris K., Elias B., Lorenzo C.
  • Group 8 was awarded “Shortest paper trail” for Paper Pinball – Milan L., Aaron G., Dan S.
  • Please Laugh was awarded “Best 2nd person perspective” for Stagehand – Chris P., Marcus S., Gregor P., Erik Ö.
  • Olympen was awarded “Layers and layers of puns” for Pungeon – Henrik W., Kevin B., David S., Adina D., Alfred S.
  • Special Ingredient was awarded “Most realistic clay physics” for BURNING BABY – José V., Joana V., Dennis H., Ivan B., Brandon M., Sascha H.
  • Group 12 was awarded “Comedy Tabletop RPG” for Laugh Quest: Roleplay Rumble – Bianca T.
  • Team MJT was awarded “Exquisite, Enchanting, Excellent” for Everett’s Eatery of Exotic Eats – Torsten H.
  • Group 14 was awarded “I’m scared” for Who’s Laughing Now – Per F., Victor Å., Tadej G.
  • Group 15 was awarded “Hue hue hue hue!” for Bher’loth-Bher’loth Happy Refueling – Dennis V., Tristan L., Lisbeth F.
  • Group 16 was awarded “Most screenwriter-ready” for Elevator Pitch – Daniel S., Jakob H., Adam N., Scotty Y., Mathias E.
Expand to see more specific feedback on the games from Torsten

I’m by no means an expert while giving out this feedback, and most of what I’ll write here will be my own personal thoughts and opinion. Given in alphabetical order.

Bher’loth-Bher’loth Happy Refueling

The game loop had me try a few times, which makes for great replayability, and is something I’ve noticed in each iteration of these Cthulhu-inspired creations each year that I look forward to the next installation of. I laughed at the residents when they laughed, and laughed just as much when they were running away. I spent my time gathering them together to generate fuel for my ship. Though I think what may be missing is an indication of how well it’s going, both in how much fuel left is required for the ship and the progress of it being tipped over and failing the game. Otherwise this is as always, a well made game.

BURNING BABY

This had interesting developments with the use of photogrammetry. Gameplay was fun and the overall feel was good, though I believe there is something missing in directing the player in the objectives and the feedback of each player action. The controls could (still) be simplified and I suppose in future it would also be good to consider for a 4-player (and single player) mode. The models were cute and definitely added to how enjoyable the game is. Good job on a worthwhile two player experience!

Chuckle cam

This entry I had great curiosity of from the start, as you are all programmers and decided on an idea very quickly. The result is also very much in line with this year’s theme, so props to that! I’m happy to see that there’s a quick disclaimer and warning about recording, as that’s something that a player can be unaware of. It looks like everything runs smoothly and absolutely has the player interact, engage and react in quite an interesting way. I did see players ‘sleeping’ by looking away from the camera, so letting the player know they should show their closed eyes in some way or informing them that the game reads facial expressions and not gestures could prevent that misunderstanding. Well done ~

Elevator Pitch

Solid submission, with good execution. When I talked about this game with you, you mentioned that you had certain updates to make which indicates to me you had quite a lot of thoughts on improving the experience. The result of each pitch could be saved down perhaps! In future it would be interesting if more variety to the pitch bit of the game (and in turn the results) was added so that players could enjoy a less linear experience. Nothing grand, but just enough to have players thinking about what possibilities there are a bit more 😉

Epic Trumpet Simulator

Really enjoyed the meme factor and ‘animation’ of the cats playing the instruments. The easiest setting was the most enjoyable for me to play. Somehow the increases of difficulty had me struggle with the jumps in difficulty too hard to manage. The notes map for the medium level could also be tweaked a little more so that there is more ‘expression’ if that makes sense. Though I think the time constraint of the event probably prevented enough playtesting to find a balance for each difficulty level. It’s an enjoyable game though, pretty sure I supremely suck at rhythm-based gameplay

Everett’s Eatery of Exotic Eats

This is a game I created, and I will give some feedback for future me to read. I believe I need to implement a way to knock down points from a plate, adjust some of the values for such a large disparity of resulting points, and add ‘peeking’ mechanics for the uncooked ingredients. Maybe even a mechanic that prevents the movement of ingredients during a turn. And maybe forcing players to cook all their ingredients. Overall I think there is something there for it to become an entry worth continued development on, as the base elements and main mechanics work quite well together. This game, like plenty of my other attempts, severely lacks the playtesting for it to become a better game. I do like it’s current state and where it’s going though

Laugh Quest: Roleplay Rumble

I touched base with you a few times about this game, and I’m glad it was able to be shown at the game show! While it was unintended, I initially thought that the ‘actions’ described on the card (i.e. the flavor text) were to actually be performed. Which is interesting as something to think about for an extra challenge to this game (or to determine who goes first), but also indicates that the text should indicate it’s intent better. So I would suggest a smaller type size, have it in italics, and enclosed within a border or space to make it more obvious. I do really enjoy the thought of simultaneous turns along with the catchup (tomato) mechanic, and I can see a lot of thought was put into the mechanics of the interactions made for each player. Especially since each player has slightly different stats. I can imagine a version of this game where there are mechanics introduced as “events” for each round where the audience reactions vary more in some way, causing players to reconsider the best action cards to use for their turn. Well done!

Paper Pinball

The game loop for this game was pretty solid, and I feel the movement around the space was good and allowed for enough exploration. The gaining of points was really satisfying and the bump physics gave off a pachinko feeling. For a future update, I would like to see a much larger level design where time isn’t the constraint. Clicking to change direction could also be adjusted so that there’s a way to get a larger boost, or set how much more force is given. Overall a good submission 🙂

Pungeon

While the most punny, this entry also gave the most cutesy aura. I liked that it was kept simple too. I think what’s maybe missing from the player experience is some kind of gauge to know if their choices were satisfactory or not. This could be a literal gauge or come in the form of points, or other visual indication. Going further on this line of thought, it would also be a thought to add how far into the dungeon the player is in, and if they know how much of it is left. They may expect a final boss encounter or some resolution at the end. I feel like there’s a lot of potential in this one!

Say The Line

This was quite a likeable experience, and had me play it at least twice to hear what would happen if I failed (or succeeded) at certain points. I very much liked the idea that the player has to navigate their mind in order to execute a result as a comedian on stage. However! Maybe in a future revision to this game there may be things you can do while actively outside the mind that can increase/decrease the likelihood of finding success at the end. It was fun seeing the different environments inside the mind. My jumping experience wasn’t that great, and found I could not move myself while in the air (for example) to adjust for certain jumps. It felt like the jumps were a bit ‘stiff’ otherwise. But all in all, I had fun ~

See Gull

I loved the game for how silly it is. The walk and head bob while moving around will definitely make many smile and laugh. The different dark gull skins were also a fun addition and the game handles well overall with it’s wiley objectives and movement. Two things I would like to see though! I feel separating the timer and the objectives is probably not necessary at the moment, and can be one persistent and automatic thing. The other update I would wish to happen would be indicators for certain objectives. Some general wayfinding towards the six different areas, or implementation of ‘clues’ that can help players find the frog in the tent to feed. After that, I suppose implementing as many hidden interactions and gags as possible would be what completes this game in future. As an aside, the documentation and uploading of this game is perfection. Well done!

Sinking About Willie

I like that this game has two comical stages, which I think can be developed further. So these are the moment when a player hits the failed game state and the one where the player holds on while chaos tries to pull him away. From the start (and because I didn’t build the game and played from the editor) I kept failing and it instantly reminded me of Boshy-like gameplay. So my suggestion would be to develop it further so it’s not an instant fail but one where the player has a chance to recover with a slimmer chance of succeeding, intensifying that moment.  The holding phase feels good at the start, but I feel like a mechanic is missing where the player can actually keep the game loop going by resetting the scene a little. I believe if these two stages are improved the player will be a lot more engaged with the game. This was still a good experience however. I look forward to any updates 🙂

Stagehand

This game piqued my interest in that it implemented a 2nd person perspective in the form of a camera pointed at the scene moving independently of the player yet still part of the game and it’s mechanics. The game runs smoothly and I played for a very good while. It was great finding out that bananas also served as props and could also be picked up from the set. I half expected some ones hidden in and around other objects but this was still a good experience. I guess the next step would be to figure out what limit the completed objectives need to meet and what could end the game, along with more interactions or npcs that could be affected. If an update is made I would look forward to playing more of this game ~

The Last Jest

I liked it, and played this several times. There’s always some comforting feeling while playing a deckbuilding type game, and this is no different. It had a good overall feeling, and I had fun freely choosing different options and seeing if it opened new ones to progress further. I think I got a handle on how to read their reactions, but I think the player needs to be told it more plainly in some way. One development I would like to suggest would be to somehow indicate if a certain combination has already been used, and to encourage reusing it if there’s new interactions for it available. That way a player can explore and progress without having to be as mindful about what has already been tried. Well otherwise, it was also just as fun to fail spectacularly at least once.

Trago(at)s

So at the game show, I found I struggled a lot with the controls and the pacing of this game. Oddly enough, once I got home I found the controls and general feel and pacing to be fine. It’s possible that I had trouble with the collision the most, and that’s something that should be adjusted if this were to update. The game had funny moments though, and the character itself was enjoyable. One drawback for this kind of game is that you hardly see the character’s face. To counter this you will have to either find ways so that the character faces the camera more, or, implement a bunch of cutscenes with some narration so players can get a good look and feel of whom they are playing. I loved that it felt more intense and like a horror game when in trouble. Definitely had me chuckling 🙂

Who’s Laughing Now

This is definitely not my type of game, even if there is multiplayer! But spamming the pun button did make up for my experience, where I was enjoying quite a lot of the punny dialogue. The spray was useful for marking where I’ve been too. Something that was dearly missed (even though it may have been intended) is indicating where the exit will lie on the compass. I did appreciate seeing a visual when you deactivate the dad joke monsters though, and that there was a laugh button for social settings. The first two levels were designed well as far as I could see and understand, and the monster design is nightmare fuel. However, I think it would have been a better experience to have respawning flashlight battery pickups and a recharge of bullets after a period of time instead of pickups. And a harder engage from the monsters once the light runs out of battery to avoid getting ‘stuck’ in the dark. Something like that anyways, to have a tighter loop. This game was great overall and played smoothly ~

Action shots / photos during the jam

Sixty (60) action shots survived the pre-screening this year. If you’d like to share photos with us to share freely, feel free to send them to contact@malmojamstoo.com!

The Hello video

Here is this year’s Hello video. Loved the enthusiasm!

The next Global Game Jam event will happen 20-26 January 2025.

Thank you!

The GGJ23 post jam writeup

This year’s Global Game Jam event went amazingly. The turnout had a lot of sound/music people this run, which was a first for us. Last time we had an in-person event (2020) we had a lot of graphics people, and the year before that we had a lot of programmers—both of which are quite normal situations in game jams. You may view the games at globalgamejam.org/2023/jam-sites/malmojamstoo.

Thanks again to Tarsier Studios and coherence for sponsoring our event! Together with Game Habitat, we really could not make the game jam event as successful and as inviting as what it became. Being able to provide food is incredibly important in an event taking place over the weekend. People have varying eating habits and timings which may prevent the opportunities to meet others and share thoughts. I believe the presence of the sponsors helped a lot as well. Things feel a lot more official and there’s that air of confidence and certainty.

This year a total of 58 participated and together made 14 games over the weekend at our jam site. Overall, we were part of 39,483 others making 7,606 games, out of 800 jam site locations in 108 countries. This year’s theme was “Roots”. We did great 💪

Something that’s also pretty special about this event: it’s the 10th time that I (Torsten) have organized for the Global Game Jam! 🎉

Relevant links

Improvements

As we usually do, there’s been improvements in how we do our preparations and in how we manage the event. This year however, I would like to focus more on certain aspects as a game jam organizer and think through what I would like to change for the better. So for the improvements, here’s a very concise list:

Improvements this run

  • We got two sponsors for our (mostly) food budget!
  • We made a pitch deck and website which helped sponsor talks along.
  • Giveaways were bunched so that everyone could win something, and it was easier to manage in spurts.
  • The infamous registration spreadsheet modifications were improved upon to include things like a generative check-in sheet to printout, better tracking of groups, and better tracking overall.

For next time we should…

  • Talk to sponsors two months before the event even starts to remotely happen. For GGJ that will be the start of September.
  • Get the poster done a lot earlier. Even if it was finished just in time for site registrations, it should have been finished when we plan to talk to sponsors.
  • Have an equipment checklist for ourselves, and one for participants.
  • Printout our todo checklist. Having it online is great, but less accessible and immediate.
  • A more definitive schedule during the jam to prevent untested games, bad habits, and less mingling.
  • Have more event swag including stickers, cards, trinkets, etc.
Expand to see my (Torsten’s) self-reflection, skip to the paragraph after these details for the tl;dr

Issues needing fixing before next workshop / jam event

Information towards newcomers

Game jams are normally welcoming to beginners and novices. There shouldn’t be a barrier in participating, as the in-person experience is about having a good time with others while making something together.

With that in mind there’s usually some confusion as it’s new territory for these newcomers, and information may sometimes not easily be found or understood. Mostly because game jams may be run in many different ways.

We have had good success with the start of a wiki to step through the process of submitting a game to the Global Game Jam website. And I know that GGJ has it’s own version of a game jam reference manual. But my thinking is that the wiki should expand to (for example) the typical definition of a game jam, link relevant sources, and explain what to expect at our version of the game jam / workshop events that we organize, what to prepare beforehand, what to bring.

It will not ever be required reading material, but information that can easily be found and linked should help manage expectations a lot better.

Post write-ups should maybe include feedback

We do try to play all the games either at the event and later on before the write-up. And in previous years feedback on the games made took the form of silly award titles given to each group/game.

While feedback (and it’s helpfulness) varies on who gives it and who receives it, one thing I find we need more from our write-ups is more specific feedback on the games made. I believe as long as it’s clear who the feedback is coming from, it would be nice to have some/more feedback.

If there are too many games made then a selection (either through requests or by free choice) should be fine.

A check-in and a system to help manage users

Something that would help immensely during the event would be a CRM (i.e. software that assists in “Creator Registration Management”, see what I did there?).

In the years of me organizing the event, a large bulk of managing registrations was a large undertaking that consisted of me going through the Google Spreadsheet generated from the Google Form that we use for registration.

Friday was spent with (but not limited to):

  • Checking if the user profile was made on the GGJ website,
  • Checking if they added themselves to our jam site location,
  • If they are not at the jam site location and have not placed themselves elsewhere, adding them to the site,
  • Compare the registration list with those that have added themselves to the GGJ jam site location, emailing those that have not registered,
  • Check if they got themselves into the Discord server we have,
  • If they joined the Discord server, applying the “jammer” role,
  • Send an email to those who registered but have not yet joined the Discord server,
  • Event check-ins (done physically on a printed sheet).

Saturday was spent with (and not limited to):

  • Ensure which groups formed (this is helped with an extra collaborative Spreadsheet),
  • Lock registrations through the GGJ website, and also through the Google Forms,
  • Check and collate from the game pages made compared to those who wrote down their groups,
  • This finalizes who actually dropped out / who to ignore, and settles groups that can finally be referred to by their main game.

This work needing to be done becomes a lot more frightening after there are more than 30-40 registered users. While the spreadsheet modifications takes a lot of the guesswork out for a few of these tasks, keeping track of many users sinks a lot of time when all the checking is done manually. For about 50 participants I usually spend upwards of 12 hours dealing with these tasks.

It is also difficult while the status of a lot of the users are unclear. For example, there were 7 new participants registering at check-ins, only 1 out of 6 said they could not show up from current registrations, and a handful could not be added to the GGJ jam site. Counting becomes a lot less straightforward as there may be overlap, mismatched data, or data which is simply missing.

I do have a Discord bot which does some work with keeping track of users on Discord. It’s also managed manually.

So I feel a webapp / website service which helps manage some of the above mentioned tasks would critically lighten my workload. This would make things easier because it would not rely on me feeding in the data, but the participants doing so directly. From my end I should be able to announce status information, call for certain actions to be done, or prompt for data to be filled in if needed. The Discord bot can then pull this data and automatically manage the Discord server side of things.

The added benefit would also be that participants could also use the webapp to check-out and check-in when leaving and re-entering. Or that I as an organizer could prompt a roll call if there is an emergency and we need to account for everyone.

We would also not experience ‘phantom participants’, people who register and check-in on the first day and disappear for the rest of the game jam. Or those who do not register at all (which we can then account for).

A webapp like the one described above would light the load enough for me to focus on adding and working with feedback sessions, and more time to do the game jam ourselves during the quiet moments without too much organization overhead.

Personal biometrics

So I got a smartwatch a few months back. And this is where looking at the biometric data confirms why I’m concerned with the above issues so much. My heartbeat is consistently a lot more elevated and I sleep a lot less than normal. I will share the metrics during the period of the jam event as a way to map a reference point for future jams maybe.

For this run, I will only add that my typical resting heart rate outside of the jam event is between 60-70 bpm and that I usually sleep between 5-7 hours daily. Just for added reference, I took 10927, 12579 and 8148 steps on each respective day of the in-person jam.

Heartrate vs Sleep graphs
Note that the points on these graphs show the same date in order to overlap. The labels denote what day it is instead.

If you have read through all that above, thank you very much for staying curious over my rambling! It’s a little longer than usual and a lot of the writing this post is almost in the style of stream-of-consciousness. Most of it is a sentiment that could be summed up as, “I would like to automate user management so I could be a better organizer”. But laying out out the gritty details now while the thoughts are fresh makes planning and realizing it more probable in future.

(I’m aware of certain services (like JamHost) that help with this, but I’m unsure how they manage user data, and would rather be able to keep user data safe in-house without third-party interference.)

Award titles

The Rootlegs was awarded “B-root-al chomp chomp” for Rootleg – Victor E., Karl J., Gabbriel O., Timothy B., Bazo M., Henrik H., Felix K., Victor J.
Team Beatrootz was awarded “Ah, ye ol’ t-radish-ion, bomberman style!” for Beat Rootz 2: Player edition – Tinea L., Kristian S., Jonas L., Ossian G., Tim W., Nils H.
Team Rooted was awarded “Two states of green” for Rootscaped: Overgrown, Undertended – Eric M., Sofia M., Anita O., Henrietta S., Jo C., Marharyta D.
Gorf Games was awarded “Most jazzy root toot scoot reboot loot” for Rooty & The McToots – Jonas K., Anders T., Markus N., Amanda F., Disa P.
Malmös tre musketörer was awarded “Knights-be-gone, Wilhelm style!” for Radicle – Albin N., Lukas S., Vilhelm R.,
Root Rookies was awarded “The definitive multihacker CRT sim experience” for Root Access – Paul K., Max B., Simon J., Emanuel P., Kevin B.,
ctrl+alt+graveyard-shift was awarded “Best arrowdynamics” for Bow To Noone – Per F., Victor Å.
FunGuysAreTheEnemy was awarded “Tea which has been tardi-great” for Water Bear-ers – Dennis H., Marie V., Sahlia W., Jakob H., Robin A., Alexander W., Samantha B., Kris K.
Team ESC was awarded “Help I’m stuck” for ESC – Wasin L., Jo A., Filip A.
Team SFW was awarded “It’s written in the cards” for Growth Spurt – Daniel S., Torben N., Simon A., Gustav A., Bror P.
Team NNHG was awarded “Got my beholder on tap” for Nyögth-Nyögth Happy Gardening – Tristan L., Eric T., Dennis V., Lisbeth F.
ForeverAlone was awarded “A coherent take on space groceries” for Settling In – Sandeep N.
Team MJT was awarded “The game that needed the most playtests” for ro to no to – Torsten H.
Team Pirates was awarded “I’m knot good with rope” for OVERBOARDING – Rik F., Milan L.

Expand to see more specific feedback on the games from Torsten

I’m by no means an expert while giving out this feedback, and most of what I’ll write here will be my own personal thoughts and opinion.

Rootleg

The mixed use of 2D in 3D is quite whimsical, kind of like this game. It has a very similar buildup of games like Nidhogg, where players have to hit their opponents and score before their opponent can. Perhaps one gripe I have is that their shirts match the green of the grass without meaning to. Adding a counter move seems like the next step to inspire more confrontations and less running away otherwise. A well put-together arena brawler with a fun special mob who has got a fine set of chompers. Big plus on the gameplay video!

Beat Rootz 2: Player edition

Really enjoying the dancing animals detail in this Bomberman-like 2-player game. I like the asymmetry for each of the players, though I think the next step would be to figure out powerups and ability cooldowns for the characters to add more variety in the gameplay—that or maybe something to speed up gameplay as it feels slower the longer one plays. The movement is otherwise very clean and the win conditions feel balanced and fair for the respective players. Solid submission and very nice feel to it.

Rootscaped: Overgrown, Undertended

This entry surprised me as this narrative-based game did a good job of setting the player into the shoes of the character. Exploration was straightforward and painless, and figuring out the next action(s) to progress further went smoothly. There was a shelf completely missing collision, though nothing that breaks the game experience. It would be fun to explore previously saved answering machine messages maybe right before the ending, as that seems to be the point of contact with the ‘outside world’ before stepping out, and some flourishing of sound and visual effects to add to the immersion of what happens / is happening. Maybe more alternate endings can be explored where more narrative can be fleshed out. Well done!

Rooty & The McToots

The playful characterizations and the play on words were wonderful and had me smirking. The controls were tight and the level transitions (and tooting) were a joy! I’m going to have a hard time with suggesting what to improve on, as it is a fine game with great aesthetics and game feel. There may be some hiccups with how a McToot collides with it’s own root and reverses dramatically further back, but I’m certain the tolerance for that can be adjusted easily later. This submission was simply excellent and fun to play.

Radicle

This submission shows good potential. I believe more risk-taking was maybe necessary to push it in the direction it needed to go. While I understand this was maybe meant to play like a tower defense game, it could have been better played in reverse. One way to adjust how this game plays would be to have the knights that were attacking be just one knight, who happens to have stolen a core that’s dear to the root hivemind. The gameplay would then have the player controlling the hivemind more specifically while the knight runs along a path away from the origin of the roots. There’s definitely something here and it could be reworked in a good way, and these were the thoughts that sprung to mind as I tried this game.

Root Access

I did not successfully get this project to work on my own (as of yet, I’ll try again soon), but I did watch some of it being played. It was definitely ambitious creating a game without much of a game engine and creating a multiplayer experience through Java at that! This kind of game works great in a game show or public setting, both in how it plays and in it’s thematic and aesthetic elements. I suppose if this were to continue development, I would like to see competing hacker teams where there are 4-8 players playing at the same time and between each other. A lot of different mechanics and gameplay elements can then be introduced, where opportunities for teams to interact with each other further add to the gameplay experience. Good job!

Bow to Noone

Ninja archery! Who can resist trying that? I really dig that the arrows (if not hitting an opponent) marks the next location that the player moves to. The unconventional movement makes the game more novel. And being able to shoot off the opponents hat for bragging rights just adds to the experience. Good call on adding obstacles and mist and speedlines. And the silly and punny game title. If this continues getting worked on it may be fun to have alternate gameplay modes available; racing tracks, platforming puzzles or timed collections – where a whole set would feel like a great party game to break out when having people over.

Water Bear-ers

This particular entry had me the most interested during the jam, as it showed a strong creative direction and team effort. The soundscapes produced along with the artwork makes it look and feel fantastical. The gameplay does need more visual feedback and depth within the interactions to be more immersive for players. I would suggest that players activating buffs perform an extra interaction for increased power, or to decrease the debuff amounts alternatively. It may be a quick time event-like mechanic or similar. This all may boil down to the super ambitious effort for this project however, needing an extra programmer to assist the main programming efforts. There was an overwhelming amount of assets and the build was incomplete at the eleventh hour. It would be really cool to see a more complete build in future though! Valiant efforts overall 😀

ESC

I almost felt like I was intruding and playing with a camera feed while playing this game, in a way. The repetitive nature of the setting and events, coupled with the scanline and sci-fi aesthetic gave a strong impression. It did irk me that I could not wash my hands at some point, where my character seemingly forgets and has moved on to the next task / part of the day. Comically, the forced interactions may have been the point really. So kudos on a faithful submission 😄

Growth Spurt

It was great seeing this entry come together very nicely at the very end. There may still need to be some more balancing in how easily one can ‘save up’ cards to generate for later, but the actual mechanics involved in this game work super well and are well thought out. Once the player understands how to navigate and not run out of cards, this game gives off a good state of flow and lets the player get into it. In future versions there may be consideration in adding in cards that may further help or hinder the player more so that there is more variety in what to consider. There’s probably other mechanics that can be explored too like having multiple destinations to reach, or doing the same run in less turns, or including a rival tree. This version has a pleasant ending!

Nyögth-Nyögth Happy Gardening

This game made me giggle out loud while playing it. The game is great, the art is wonderful, and the music and sound effects compliment everything to a T. I did several rounds and really appreciated some of the details put in. I would like to see more obstacles/missions added, and whatever should happen once you infiltrate the Sacred Grove. In a way, this game made me want to explore by expanding the roots, so it won’t be surprising if fog of war for the enemies was added, with maybe some other points of interest. Another adjustment would be to allow turning (or tuning) the mushrooms to grant more situational control to the player. They may drain favor quickly, but it also abruptly ends a fun experience if players aren’t constantly looking at the favor points (specifically at the rate of decrease). A well made game ~

Settling In

A solo project which has meaning sort of hidden behind the interactions. I had a chance to speak with the creator about how it relates to the theme and what it means to them, and found a touching sentiment that’s embedded within the game. If developed further I would like some of this sentiment to make it’s way as narrative within the game. As a suggestion for improving upon the gameplay itself I would work on adding tooltips and indicators for potential interactions and objectives. Good work Sandeep!

ro to no to

The game I’ve awarded needing the most playtests. In a way I am super grateful we had a game show and that I was brave enough to lay the game out bare on a table. It gave me the chance to playtest and discover plenty of issues that severely affect gameplay. The core interaction is still playful and fun however, so that will be kept in future revisions at the very least. It did need more development time really, as four hours (including the upload of the submission) is not enough time to resolve what makes the game fun. I’ll find time to revisit this in future for sure, as I’ve had amazing feedback during the game show.

OVERBOARDING

This one was tricky to figure out at first. It may still be a little unclear how to guide the rats to the ‘exit’, as I’ve taken to angering them quite frequently. That or level II really does not end. I think something that is missing in this game is an indicator of how mad the rats are so I can avoid that scenario better. Also an indicator of how many rats are left to take care of. It was nice to be able to click and hold to add/remove rope, so that interaction was quite alright. I’m really not that good at puzzle games like this, so my comments may be a little limited. I did do a bunch of attempts, so it is a game I tried more of (with about 20 or so points at level II). The aesthetic and the colors used works well enough. For a future version, maybe a little bob with parallax can be added to simulate being on a ship to give the eyes less of a static background, and some accent colors may be used to shake up the muted palette a bit.

Action shots / photos during the jam

This year a lot of photos was mostly taken during the game show. Ninety-three (93) action shots survived the pre-screening this year. If you’d like to share photos with us to share freely, feel free to send them to contact@malmojamstoo.com!

The Hello video

We should make a habit in sharing the Hello video each year. Here is this year’s Hello video!

The next Global Game Jam event will happen 22-28 January 2024.

Thank you!

The GGJ22 post jam writeup


Yet another Global Game Jam has finally run it’s course this January and I’m here to tell you how it went for us at our site in Malmö for MalmoJamsToo (https://globalgamejam.org/2022/jam-sites/malmojamstoo). This would be our ninth GGJ event 😄

Jump to the statistics & awards below. (The statistics have moved to their own page).

Preparations

So this year saw a much longer run technically, as the keynote and theme reveal were on Twitch four days ahead of schedule. Which is fine really, as all participants get an equal opportunity to know the theme beforehand, and that it’s the same for everyone.

This year was similar to last year in format and execution, which made things easier on the preparation side. A lot of the same preparations made then were done this time around too. Over the course of the last year I have been super active on the GGJ Discord.

Let’s see, in terms of giveaways we had 14 done from my HumbleBundle account. And I was able to get a poster out and it went pretty smooth to fix. Since we’ve had penguins before, and the last poster was an homage to all the previous posters, this poster was a slight departure and the introduction of something new. Some references to previous posters, but now with a different style of penguin and fish. The penguin is an in-joke to something I drew such a long while back at sketch jam, but it’s still fun to draw for some reason. So I’m rolling with it as a theme.

So we kicked off with the prep for our site at the start of December. Spent about a week with the poster, the form, any adjustments, Facebook event, interview with the Regional Organizer and email sendout. The Facebook Boost started beginning of January, along with any of the active reaching out made on Game Habitat’s Discord, reminders and another Discord announcement. This is probably the easiest description I’ve made about preparations so far, only because it was the same as last year for the most part.

The game jam event

Again, for the most part, a lot of this was on cruise control. During the course of the game jam event, I’ve gone ahead and super optimized the Google Sheets responses. Thankfully this was not as bad as it was last year, and most of these changes were to increase comfort with managing such data in a way that is a lot more fool-proof. I also had the foresight to bookmark a lot of GGJ links that I need for things like: adding a jammer to my jam site, downloading the jammer list, viewing the current games, seeing the complete member list. Those all worked in my favor later when I had to verify and validate the responses from the Google Form, our Discord server and the GGJ website.

This year saw me create yet another tabletop game which saw at least two playtests and iterations. This year’s submission was made with a little more care and I was able to manage a print-and-play PDF of the game, complete with rules and instructions. It would need some papercrafting, but there’s always a way to not do that.

Our virtual meeting place Topia.io came back, and was used twice. Once at the start and once when we ended. I think in future we may just use Google Meet or Discord’s voice chat instead. A virtual environment may still return at some point, but I feel we haven’t found that kind of engagement level in order to make going into a virtual meetup special enough for our community in particular. That said, I had a really nice time during the last Topia visit when we did a quick closing ceremony for a few of the participants who were up for it. It was one group mostly who were able to share their experience and a little bit about what they thought for their first game jam. It’s always cool to hear these experiences so I was grateful for that 😄

The MalmoJamsToo wiki made a comeback as well this year. It definitely is a success as I hardly have any issues from any of the teams submitting. Actually it was rather quiet and was almost worrisome for awhile, especially during Saturday when I did not get reports of group forming happening. Some of that was also me struggling with the Google Sheets solution and finding better ways to mark and track ungrouped users! Somehow I kind of repeated what happened last jam, even if it was not as harsh to deal with this year. The custom Discord bot I made also made a comeback and does some nice things that help deal with getting a better picture of the event.

Other final thoughts

Overall this was a chill and fun Global Game Jam event. I really do like implementing and emphasizing the ‘chill’ bit. More than not it reflects the attitude and the atmosphere of jamming at the event and hanging out in general. While we see a dip in participation / motivation in terms of our numbers, especially in the last two years because of the on-going global situation, the numbers point to a positive trend in terms of the breakup of people participating, their experience with game jams, if they were with us before and so on. The amount of games made are lower mostly because there were quite a few groups that had many members, which is totally fine and feels rather cozy.

This was a new Google Sheets page made to show the on-going stats during the course of the jam event.

So here are your games

Below you can find the groups, games and our custom award titles below.

The order is in the order of group formations, and then in the order of who signed up earliest for the jam event. So basically there’s no real order to these games 😄

LFG Games was awarded “Too cool to be hot” for A Cold Summer – Mattias L., Mina M., Vanessa G., Jonathan M., Elias C., Christoffer C.
Terrible team was awarded “I now have ornithophobia” for Magnet Magnus – Ossian G., Tim W., Jonas L., Tinea L., Amanda B., Johan M., Kristian S.
Det Ständigt Svåra was awarded “I want to understand too!” for Don’t Shoot Me! – Markus N., Sara L., Patrik A., Mirelle E.
We Cry 4 Ale was awarded “I’m seeing…double?” for D&Drunk Mirrors – Emilia L., Domenico F., Sonia C., Christian C.
Ingen aning was awarded “I Wanna Be the Markus (speedrunner ver.)” for A Game For Markus – Hugo H., Oliver Ö.
Team Torsten was awarded “Spy warez” for stattrition – Torsten H.
The Cuarteillos was awarded “Awww! Aw no” for Sucky Bloody School – Martin A., Borb H., Jakob H., Martin A., Rikard A.

The GGJ21 post jam writeup

Twenty-twenty one. It starts here at this desktop computer. A little more than two weeks ago I helped host the Global Game Jam Online event. The eighth Global Game Jam event so far! Want to see the games uploaded this year? Find them at https://globalgamejam.org/2021/jam-sites/malmojamstoo.

Jump to the statistics & awards below. (The statistics have moved to their own page).

Preparations

This year was different in many ways. I’m thankful for those who were able to support me by just being around in some way, including my volunteer Mellifloss and my partner for keeping me in check while I was being an absolute legend.

It was not at all really clear until beginning of December that I was going to attempt hosting a game jam site. A lot of things therefore became last minute or scoped down by a lot. But it was important for me to keep some of the feel of previous jams somewhat in this remote version of this in-person game jam.

Did a lot of the usual then… from creating the poster and banner images, the Facebook event, invites and even boosting it a short while. The Discord announcement was made, the newsletter email was drafted and sent, and I did also get to announce it on Game Habitat’s Discord (which I was totally glad they welcomed). I tried to look for alternative ways to reach out too, like maybe Eventbrite or Meetup might have been good. But sadly they came with their own ways of doing things, especially with a certain global situation we were experiencing all of 2020.

Didn’t do some of the helper stuff I did last year for GGJ, but on the other hand, I was a lot more hands-on in the GGJ Discord. The previous access I had helped a lot of individual requests as well. So that was a positive tradeoff and that’s all good really. I also had 25 total game key giveaways throughout the event from my HumbleBundle stash.

The game jam event

In contrast to yesteryear’s GGJ, all my stuff for the jam was already near my desktop. The registration form with the Discord activity were automatic check-in posts (that means no reception duty). No location logistics or food to really triple check to ensure a smooth onboarding.

But like many of the previous GGJ events, I had to rework the registration form responses on Google Sheets to have a clear image of how the event is going. You see, I thought I was being smart by starting with that kind of preparation a few days before the event started. Turned out I was well into Saturday fixing and future-proofing a lot of the formulas so that I won’t have to suffer as much in future game jam events and workshops. So for posterity I’ll briefly describe what Google Sheets I had:

  • One for registration. Checks if they exist on Discord and/or the GGJ website. It also kept track of people who left or did not participate (of which there were two).
  • One to check further and compare results to ensure participants have registered properly. It also checked experience levels of the participants and how many are potential repeats from last year. Two participated but didn’t register.
  • One for tracking group status. We had a Google Sheet that people were invited to list their names and groups freely to. This sheet tracked who wasn’t in a group and who was in what group.
  • One for tracking tasks done. Usually only as documentation to help me write these evaluation write ups.
  • One for in-jam tournament(s) (Not used this run).
  • Four sheets to help import the data to be used. The sources were the jammer list from the GGJ website, a listing from the previous game jam, a Discord user listing (unused; to be worked on) and a manual copy of the group formations Sheet.

I was still able to create a tabletop game. I’ve yet to test it properly, but I think something quite decent was made. Like all previous tabletop games I create, the submission is super barebones and mostly only includes rules, a set of instructions and a lot of photos to help recreate the experience. This one shouldn’t be that bad though. I think last year’s needed some papercrafting construction that may not be everyone’s fancy.

Well, me doing tabletop entries and my Google Sheets wizardry has evolved over the years and is a very old hat topic by now. But we did do some things that were new! Enter Topia.io. A virtual meeting place that you can customize quite freely. In a way our attempts to use it flopped. But as it’s something utterly new to me and the server in general, I feel it was still a win to try out. I even shelled out for a month’s subscription and I don’t regret the purchase. The experience had the in-person feeling we were kinda missing from this remote event. The problem was that since the main line of communication was through Discord, people would not know you are logged into Topia. I tried with scheduled meetups. They work for those eager to use Topia and those that have a slight interest. I later added a muted Discord voice channel that allowed people to “show” they are online on Topia. This should allow people to feel more welcomed to join whenever instead of a distinct meeting time (which totally felt forced by myself).

A screenshot from the last virtual meetup in Topia (with 11 users on).

Another new thing were the wiki entries I added using MDwiki on our website which describe the game project creation and the game submission process in more detail. The thing that irked me from Friday was that, I wasn’t really able to hold a live watch party like we do in our in-person event. That also means I can’t just bump heads with people to help them out spontaneously. I’m very serendipitous in this manner and usually end up helping others in a more natural and organic way. Doing this event remotely means I am unable to do that. So I opted with very clear, concise instructions that I can link to describe each big moment. It surprisingly worked very well. No one complained or found them unhelpful, and pretty much every group successfully submitted their game project pages and submissions. There were three projects which needed a slight correction in the upload itself, though for one of the groups it was a matter of the filesize and their connection to the GGJ website at a certain timeframe (the GGJ website experiences large amounts of traffic during the submissions). But all groups were able to submit the source in some form which I could then (if corrections were needed) quickly affix to the GGJ website. Curious about the wiki entries? Visit our wiki to check them out.

Since a video felt like a lot more effort and messy…clear written instructions just felt right.

Other final thoughts

Well, our Discord bot was not present this year really. I discovered there was a large update to v12 for DiscordJS, which meant I needed to revise the code I had for our current bot if I wanted to have a fully working bot again. That’s on hiatus for now as I want to purpose-build with something more specific in mind.

I also got a little sleepless during the event. I blame feeling too excited and being too invested in spreadsheet formulas. Felt a little burnt out and needed a slow two weeks to recoup as well…but hey, here we are. Below you’ll find your games, our awards and the statistics.

So here are your games

Below you can find the groups, games and our award titles below.

People with asterisks after their name were people off-site who did cross-site collaboration. There was also a group of two who never formally registered to our jam site yet still submitted a game.

Unnamed Dreamteam was awarded “parent-child mimic-ry” for Treasure Hunted – Mattias L., Carl K., Victor E., Dennis H.
OAT was awarded “dashy bird” for Kraaka – Tim W., Ossian G., Amanda B.
MEJK was awarded “TrashTag tips and trips” for Kessler Syndrome – Martin A., Kristian S., Jonas L., Eric A., Hampus N.
Bugz was awarded “game-o-deme” for Deme – Marie E., Paul N.
Jamzilla was awarded “KonMari method practice” for Lost and Found VR – Patrick P., Mattias S., Patrik N., Jack S., Alfred A., iEva*, Matt jr*, Mikey*, Matt C.*, Luke S.*
Were-Llama was awarded “three for the price of one” for Memory Loss – Job Z., Jaffar S.
Name pending was awarded “press escape after escape” for Find the Ladder – Oliver Ö., Hugo H., Jonas E.
Jambulance was awarded “PewDiePie’s found sock” for Asockalypse Gnome – Mirelle E., Niklas O., Gabriel H., Markus N., Patrik A., Sara L.
De Borttappade was awarded “yeet! yeet! f–k! yeet! oof!” for Skattjakt – Tobias N., Harald W.
(Flutter game) was awarded “my paper heart’s a-flutter” for Flutter – Sandeep N., Shailesh P., Amit G., G A.
Team Torsten was awarded “yessir” for As Per Your Request – Torsten H.

The tiny Topia world I quickly mashed together on the first day of the event.

That’s it for now! Thanks for reading our writeup 😀

The GGJ20 post jam writeup

Whew! That concludes our seventh Global Game Jam event as organizers. Thanks and thanks again to our sponsor Tarsier Studios for sponsoring us and to Game Habitat for the hosting of the event!

Visit https://globalgamejam.org/2020/jam-sites/malmojamstoo to see the games submitted this year.
The next GGJ happens 29–31 January 2021!

You can jump straight to the statistics and awards below. (The statistics have moved to their own page).

Preparations and our sponsor

We were out really early with an approved venue and the announcement of the event on Facebook. We got approved on the 18th October, and the Facebook event went out shortly after. Was able to announce through Game Habitat’s (and our own) Discord on the 12th of November…which is also earlier than our usual. Tarsier Studios were superheros to our food budget and came on-board early January! Woo!

Did two runs for the poster, this happens to be on the second run at Orkanen during January.

I held off with the posters until about early December though. It was mostly because it took about a month to get it drawn due to a work situation that I had to deal with. December was especially hard to get any further preparations done because of that same reason. I did visit a class in Malmö University and gave them feedback on their game projects for about 3 hours. I believe quite a few of the students, even if their course ended, were participants (I should ask about where participants heard about us from in the registration form in future to get a better idea…).

We were also really grateful that Tarsier Studios could support us (again!) for this run. We got in contact with them early January. Embracer Group recently acquired Tarsier Studios and it was announced two weeks prior, but as luck would have it, they allocated budget for this jam from last year. Which suddenly covered any food budget we needed. Both Game Habitat and Tarsier were super supportive and it really helped make the event possible for us to plan without accommodation worries.

The game jam event

This year we only had me as the site organizer present for the planning and the event. Thankfully Eliana from Game Habitat was in touch and made sure I kept on track at times. We also got two Game Habitat volunteers to join in on the jam which, by presence alone, assured me that things will go smoothly with the venue. In particular, Lewis helped with ordering for our pizza night and Yeliz helped out a lot with the cleaning. Martin helped manage the reception during my sleepy hours and Jaime with his advice and management were both invaluable in keeping my sanity in check overall. My partner Becky was also present for a lot of the daytime jam to keep me cool and collected. I may still have needed a week to recoup properly but without a lot of this support I would have supremely struggled with getting such a smooth experience during the jam. So if you happen to be reading this, thank you!

I uhh…probably didn’t need the extra bag or two. Or three.

On a sidenote, I had my hands and bags full and maybe brought a bit too much. I did not need to bring it all on the day in any case, and could have sent it in a day or two in advance next time. It would have also helped if I had a set itinerary as I was running back-and-forth in the apartment trying to bring all I could. Notable things I will not forget for next time include wet wipes, and a luggage case to avoid having so many little things to carry. Although having carabiners helped me out in “linking” some of it together making it somewhat more manageable.

This year we had no tickets or indication of being a participant, so our reception work suffered some overhead and involved having to remember the faces of those we checked in. As we usually do we checked people in through the Google Form responses on Google Sheets. Unfortunately it’s not very efficient when I manually verify all registrations against them being on Discord, if they have a GGJ profile and if it’s part of our jam site and eventually if they made a game submission. It took me the rest of Friday evening and about 3 hours Saturday morning to verify most of it. At the spur of the moment I also created a group formation Google Form which helped a bit with solidifying check-ins. It was also a way to prevent any weird behaviors like check-ins made without any intentions of staying. We will need tickets or similar in future though, mostly as a security measure for the reception. I was thinking of lanyards for volunteers and separate ones for those who do not wish to be photographed as well, so that they are easily spotted.

When it came to reception duty I mostly got help from both Becky and Martin for whenever I could not answer the door. Though I feel like we should simply close the reception and have set hours when participants can freely come in. Then if they truly need to be let in they will have to get the volunteers or myself notified before they leave and to open up for them later, either through Discord or through their teammates if not on Discord. For the hours I think the earliest we got people in was about 8:00 in the morning until about 11:00, then a slight stream came in later on in the afternoons. The latest could might as well be set to midnight or 1:00 on Friday and Saturday to allow for sleep.

Game profile pages and management

As there was a change in how GGJ handles game profile creations, we had to wait until Saturday morning for groups to start creating them. This wasn’t really an issue, as I almost literally sped through our practical presentations and conveniently glossed over that we want groups to create game profiles as soon as they form groups. I was super-nervous doing it alone and really did not get a chance to rehearse it well enough. It was received pretty well for the amount of information they had to absorb right before a 25min keynote and theme reveal though. In future I think I would like to place a lot of it on the website, or a portal, or some kind of quickstart guide we somehow give out digitally and can remind participants to look at on Discord.

One thing I would like as a GGJ Site Organizer though, is the ability to manage game profile pages. Sometimes no matter how many times you state that a group should, for example, upload their source to the GGJ website—the jam event is a messy experience already to begin with and some groups may not always be on top of the reminders and such. A lot of participants want to enjoy and have fun. Since the presentations and Discord announcements are a lot of information to take in and process at times, I do not fault a couple of groups for being inattentive to certain details.

Submissions went smoothly overall though, seeing 20 games this year with one group doing two games and two participants floating between two other groups.

Food

Imagine, we ate and drank all this up over the weekend.

About half of the food budget was dedicated to bread and wraps with toppings, along with the drinks. They lasted until Sunday because of the pizza we had, so the amount ordered was enough. We experienced someone taking a package of wraps unfortunately, so I believe during Sunday afternoon we need to be wary and portion out the rest of the food to avoid that behavior. Self-made wraps was a great thing to make during the mornings and throughout the day, and I believe we should keep it so in future.

Now the pizza. We ordered a lot. And this run will probably be the only run where we allowed a lot of freedom, as we allowed participants to order what they would like from Dominos. We found this immediately became an issue as it “ate” the rest of our budget rapidly. Thankfully we were able to manage, as we had some leftover budget from last GGJ to cover the extra cost. I think most people were happy. There was an order or two to get a large sized pizza, and we had to disappoint them as we’ll blow the budget on just that. One thing we didn’t think through was how small the gluten-free pizzas were. Dominos simply didn’t have medium sized gluten-free pizzas available to order. We should (next time) just double those orders as they were unacceptably small. On a funnier note, the pizza delivery’s car was full and was full with only our orders.

Next time we will just order Margherita, gluten-free and any no cheese pizzas by request and then either ask everyone to bring their own premade toppings from home or to be happy with free pizza. We applied a discount from Dominos but otherwise they request that we contact them much earlier beforehand to sort out a 20% discount on single orders, which is not really what we were going for in a food sponsor. In total I believe we had an order of about 40 pizzas…we’re not sure who shared halves.

Events in the event

“Hej från Malmö Sverige, WOOOO!”

We got the Hello video shot on Saturday, right before pizza. Since we have it at the same venue, a similar shot was used where we went up the stairs and shot below. We got coordinated with a “hej från Malmö Sverige”, a clap and a cheer by a countdown of my fingers. And this time we made sure the shot wasn’t cut too early as in previous years. Also new was the #media channel for our volunteers to upload photos to, which worked out pretty nicely as it was the jam team and the volunteers that were tasked with taking photos.

We did not get to do the mini-tournament event thing this round, as I forgot to bring enough batteries and there’s the issue of brackets/matchup for the participants. A silly prize or certificate wasn’t thought through either but wasn’t as important. As we planned pizza time over the same time frame it simply took over what was planned as the tournament. Reflecting back, it would be nice to have something that automates the matchup on-the-fly and that we have the tournament a little bit earlier.

Some other final thoughts

We did not manage sleeping as we would have liked. It apparently was very Swedish and some felt like they were intruding into the sleeping areas. During the first night we were also notified that the women’s sleeping area was larger than the general sleeping area. We later switched the rooms around though there weren’t issues to begin with because of how Swedish everyone slept.

If I organize next year again it would be nice to also set up regular runs around the bathrooms and trash for regular checks and eventual cleanup. The reception was only notified twice the whole run for these things and it was not easy keeping track of usage without purposefully checking at intervals.

The game show had a small amendment which also helped jammers clean up a little bit beforehand. We set it up in a large U format so that people may mingle in the middle of the room and visit the outer edges to play the games. I think we should continue with this as it clears up most of the mess and it formalizes the game show part as well.

Our contact at Malmö University was very willing to collaborate with us before the jam event, though at such short notice it was hard to fix any workshop days or anything else in general. So in preparation for next year we should look into some kind of collaboration where we both can benefit in terms of knowledge sharing and more engagement from potential participants. It should happen many months in advance.

Well, it went alright actually!

Our Discord server has seen a good engagement in presence. We’ll try to also encourage more chatter and activities in the coming months, as long as we can develop a system which can manage these activities better. A lot of it ties to automating a lot of the formalities for such activities, so there’s something to look forward to if one sticks around on the server. We noted that people at the very least enjoyed the giveaways (16 including 1 physical tabletop and 30 keys from a generous jammer), and the pizza and group formation forms were also part of coordinating activities through the server as it’s our main line of communication during the event.

Anyways, enough babbling from me and on to more useful information!

GGJ21 is scheduled for the 29th of January (to the 31st). I look forward to planning and organizing it again at least once more 😀

Here are your games

Below you can find the groups, games and our award titles below.

The only one I could not play again was 2020, because of a lack of Buzz controllers, but I hope my award title is suitable based on what I saw at the game show

Group 18 was awarded “Turn THATS and COOL on, then EXECUTE.” for 20 Seconds to Impact – Christian V., Henrik L., Joschka, Mattias L., Stefan J., Tristan L.
Basket tree was awarded “We’re all in it together, all 20 of us” for 2020 – Andreas S., Benjamin M., Emil L., Harald W., Kristoffer F.
Langoljärerna was awarded “Viscera Visits 2D” for After Credits – André L., Anton L., Arvid O., Daniel L., Magnus N.
PlanetaRypear was awarded “It’s time for pen and breakfast” for Bad Game – Aron T., Martin A., Samantha B.
Lizard Boomers was awarded “Blobamari Damacy pt. 2” for Blobstar – David L., Fernando V., Lewis W., Miriam P., Yeliz S.
Dracula Buttheads was awarded “Unpleased Vlad was amused though” for Captain Dracula – Conny N., Dominic N., Mikkel C., Nina S.
Group 15 was awarded “My basket tastes great!” for Earth’s old timid grace – Gabriel J., Thiago A.
Group 16 was awarded “This is why we can’t have mice things” for Fast and Furry (not a japonese fantasy game) – Patrice P., Petro H.
The Hunkerhives was awarded “Pin the tail Hardcore Anime Edition” for Hunkerhive – Daniel S., Elin H., Fer K., Joseph C., Katja F., Maximilian M., Teodor Z.
Kind regards, was awarded “Here’s my certificase and a typo” for I’ve Attached My CV And Cover Letter – Jaime M.
Group 17 was awarded “the key to a mended heart” for love is the key – Sam S.
Team Grynte was awarded “I’m a little dizzy… :D” for Repair Drone – Eric T.
Tonksten was awarded “tanks it made me tink” for retinker – Torsten H.
The Lizard Factory was awarded “Maybe the controller did help” for Socket Up – Daniel T., Jill P., Jonas H., Nils M.
Group 19 was awarded “Oh yeahhhhhh” for T-Minus Santa – Christian V., Domenico F., Fabian L., Henrik L., Rasmus J.
Slashasarna was awarded “From trash can’t to trash can” for Trash Cat – Felix W., Otto K.
TurtleDuck was awarded “That’s MY hammer!” for UFO Repair! – Fredrik S., Hugo H., Jonas E., Oliver Ö.
PinkMoose was awarded “Whoopsy fires everywhere” for Unit 235 – Nuclear Repair Force – Karin T., Magnus A., Robert T.
PlanetaRypear was awarded “It’s alive!” for Vasilly – Aron T., Emilia L., Gustav J., Martin A., Samantha B.
Brackeys Fan Club was awarded “One robot’s trash is another’s leg” for What The Scrap – Adrian C., Alexander F., Jack S., John H., Kristian T., Simon T.

Recognition also goes to:
SustainGame – Melanie K., Melissa B.

All the action shots for this event can be found below! Thanks for reading our writeup 😀

Thanks for GGJ19!

Introduction

Thanks again for what is now a sixth GGJ jam, it continues to be a challenge and a learning experience. The next Global Game Jam happens 31 January to 2 February 2020! You can visit https://globalgamejam.org/2019/jam-sites/malmojamstoo to see the games submitted this year

You can hop straight to the statistics or the awards we have below. (The statistics have moved to their own page).

Big big thanks to Tarsier Studios and Game Habitat for helping us out in sponsoring and supporting us! Without you both it would have been a lot tougher to make the event even happen

The site approval process was swift this year with Global Game Jam which we were glad for, though our overall logistics such as location and sponsorship were quite late in the arrangements. It’s a balancing act that we sometimes just cannot really control, but we did feel relieved things weren’t too stressful

We took some opportunities this year as the newly established location for Game Habitat made for a well-situated place for food. It was also an obvious choice of venue as it is purpose-fitted towards the event in general, not to mention that we fit very well together and they have supported us in previous GGJs in the past. So it really was a pleasure to continue working with them

Logistics and planning

Poster preparation was slightly later than usual, even if it was started earlier. It was quite hard to pull off in a timely manner as we had some uncertainties with arrangements from the start. We may start two versions of the poster and plan it’s creation better for future jams

We implemented a barcode check-in which potentially identifies jammers for event purposes. A mishap with the registrations concerning dynamic spreadsheets prevented us from enabling the above system further though. But it did make for a very quick and easy way of identifying jammers! We’ll continue trying to improve the check-in process with this idea in mind

This year we’ve streamlined our registration form and it’s resultant spreadsheet (again). We have some ideas to make it even less demanding, doubled with looking to automate registrations and event member handling

We tried Facebook boosting for a week longer than what we had last year. Unfortunately it seems that it would have been a better investment to have kept the boost the same as last year considering it’s reach this year if we look at how we fared previous years

What we did find as a welcomed change were the invite cards and the Discord check-in sheet. Though very minor things they did add that little bit extra (personally in any case) and felt like it complemented the jam experience

This year’s poster was a little special, and we’ve taken steps to improve it’s presentation and break out from the usual format we had from years back. This new direction makes the event clearer to those who are new to game jams and us. As per usual we still try to challenge ourselves to show something new and try something different, this time sporting an arcade cabinet which has more vector artwork than our (previous) penguin poster

The Discord stays strong this year, and the announcements and other communications went through without a sweat. One amendment we did was to collect most announcements into a super announcement at the beginning. Makes it easier to look for the information if it’s in one place. This year we also started with giveaways to keep participants engaged in some way to the chat. It was kind of an experiment where we requested those who won to retrieve their keys physically from us at reception. It was received rather well, so we hope to continue with the same next jam

The game show went as usual. We allowed it to happen a bit more haphazardly than having a dedicated area, but in a way it allowed jammers to wander around the space a bit to mingle and chat, which was more important than presentation. The negative effect from doing so though was that we spent more time with the cleanup after the jam ended

Here are your games

Below you can find the groups, games and our award titles below. This year we will forgo certificates (we plan to revamp them so look forward to that update later)

Patata Games was awarded “the reflective fox” for When you lost your home – Beatriz R., José I.
Court of Three was awarded “a desirable outcome” for The Corrupt Council – Linus A., Joshua C., Nina S.
Scuffed Productions was awarded “eye see what this is” for Sticky Situation – Viktor J.
Snurkelspring was awarded “one button hell” for Snurrspring – Berk G., Gustav J., Per M., Emil H.
Pun’d It! was awarded “has a nice ring to it” for Opening Up – Torsten H., Jaffar S., Jasmin S., Job Z., Samanta M., Martin S.
Mechyboiz was awarded “a sluggish snailien” for Mechyboiz – Oliver D., Johan W., Victor J.
:potato: was awarded “i thinky n floaty” for Keepsake – Amanda R., Robin A., Emilia L., Fernando V., Samantha B., Artjoms N.
Colourful Socks was awarded “let’s start a cult!” for Home Is Where The Hearth Is – Anders T., Joschka P., Tristan L., Mattias L., Stefan J.
Team Bateia was awarded “best laid plans” for Domestic – Jill P., Nils M.
Team ferzona was awarded “death don’t part us tho” for DEATH DO US PART – Rattanun K., Gabriel H., Max M., Martin A., Noel T.

Overall this run was quite alright really. From the numbers we see that overall participants have increased but we have a slight decrease in repeat jammers from last year. Interestingly we had some jammers who have registered for jams in previous years but have not come until this year! Another factor which affected our outcome greatly were certain other nearby jam sites

In any case, the fancypants infographic below helps detail some of these insights along with quick summaries from previous years

Couldn’t get enough photos? Enjoy this slideshow of some of the (like, 30) other action shots we took

Quick tour of the game show in progress

Thanks for a wonderful GGJ18!

We hosted the Global Game Jam again this year, now for the fifth time. GGJ is now also a decade old! The next one, GGJ19, will be on the 25–27th January 2019. Here in this writeup we’ll describe some of what went on during the course of this year’s event and also our thoughts in hindsight

You can visit https://globalgamejam.org/2018/jam-sites/malmojamstoo-stpln to see the resulting games. As usual we have a game or two which aren’t present because of choice or laziness, but the participants are still counted in as part of the jam

You can hop straight to the statistics or the awards we have below. (The statistics have moved to their own page).

Our biggest thanks goes out to STPLN for allowing us to jam at their space, and to Game City who made a lot of the stress in planning much more manageable. This year we also had Massive Entertainment and Domino’s Pizza as sponsors as well

So we were late

We were really late this year. Like really, really late. But it was an unavoidable kind of late where we just had to suck it up and deal with it. So this year marks the first year, with the exception of the first time we started hosting for the GGJ, where we were a lot more unprepared. It was chaotic and I’m surprised we even pulled the event off without so much of a hitch

Without going into personal details leading up to being unavoidably late, we started carrying out our plans mid-December to the beginning of January. Pretty much the same period when we did our first GGJ. We may not have the increase in number of participants as we have in previous years, but there has been some other quite interesting numbers which were pleasantly surprising

Getting the space ready

All this being said, we most likely would have struggled a lot more if it wasn’t for our main sponsor Game City. They agreed to sponsor us in a way where we could worry a lot less about how to deal with the financial side of things. Game City still does game development community based events and Peter also helps support an incubator space for game startups at MINC, our previous jam site. Shoutout to Eliana who was also there to help us for this game jam run 🙂

A big reason for moving away from MINC and going for STPLN this year is that MINC is no longer able to accommodate a hackathon-like event very easily. There were a lot more policies which restricts access in a lot of ways, and things which made security and responsibility very difficult to work with for events that span overnight

In contrast STPLN was well-fitted for weekend events and have experienced hackathons and game jams before, a notable one being the No More Sweden game jam for a few years. We had zero issues with alarms and people jammed all in one big area. People were allowed to sleep on site too!

STPLN very generously supplied us with a lot of leftover soda. And I believe we went through a lot of bottles even if they were over a year passed their best before date. I don’t think we made a dent to their supply though

Consequences of late planning

We had registrations open on the 17th of December. We sent out an email to all previous jammers who are still subscribed to us too, which is something we usually do. This year though, we have added our subscribers into MailChimp. The change is also so people can easily unsubscribe from us, and so we don’t keep sending out mass emails manually (someday we’ll make a mistake I’m sure). Another change we also added was that we sent out a Facebook ad about a week before the event. We fell into trying this also because we couldn’t do poster distribution on time and we were also behind with gathering sponsors on board. For the most part, I think we had a good reach with the ad and it has attracted more signups even if just for the week it ran. We targeted those who already Liked our Facebook page and their friends, and kept it in the Skåne region. It translated to about 4-5 kr per link click. The money was out of our pockets as it was more of a pilot to see what would happen

In terms of sponsors we had a good amount, even getting to include Domino’s Pizza into the mix this year, though it may have been a bit late into getting it all arranged. For Domino’s in particular we would have liked to have had more time to get people on board to go for Domino’s. Or maybe negotiated or planned more openly for more conveniences for jammers. Either the delivery should have been free or the discount increased on their end. Or that we compromised and bought pizzas and added our own discount on top to make things more convenient may have worked out better

On other fronts there wasn’t much prep to support tabletop jams and absolutely no slot for Twitch or any streaming of any kind. In a way it was good to tone it down a bit since we wouldn’t have been able to handle either very much that weekend. STPLN has a wonderful variety of tools, machines and materials, but like the limited bandwidth on the wireless network, it would have been too much overhead and effort to set it up correctly this time around

We still had a poster for the event though, but it was something jammers could take home instead, which feels pretty nice along with taking a certificate actually. We’ve had pretty nice posters the last few years, and just like the certificates, we try to show something new (clicking them gives you an A3 size of the poster!)

Some things went right, though

We adopted Discord over Slack for communications this year, and I feel we are so much more comfortable with using it for our events. Slack may have threads and the Unreads feature, but Discord makes it easy to join a server if you already use it for gaming. At that point we’ve also had the chance to go through several other game jam Discords and studied what makes for good structure and balance for the server, and have plans in the future to automate the organization a lot more with our own Discord bot. Hopefully by next GGJ it would be put to better use. We otherwise were able to set up channels for planning to-dos and also one for noting what we can improve on for next time. It was seriously much better than logging it all in a spreadsheet. The registrations, check-ins and some of the other checks we made stayed on the spreadsheet for now though

We kept the PUSH GO tourney and it’s still a nice break from the jam. Like last year we distributed The Division codes kindly provided to us from Massive Entertainment. We also took a group photo and a hello video which I hope turns out alright. During our presentation I let Jaffar keep the stage instead of switching up. It made things a lot smoother overall and felt more solid. Certificates have been updated yet again too (like honestly, it’s pretty much tradition at this point), but this time we hopped over scrambling to fix certificate titles and left it for the post-mortem to actually announce them! Jammers are then free to write their own or adopt ours as they wish. Or just leave it blank that’s cool too

Here are our results

You can see the groups (in no particular order), their games and our award titles below.

Afneep was awarded “very- hey my right ear isn’t that big!” for Torsten Made Us Do It – Emil H., Fredrik S., Per M.
THE DICTATOR was awarded “so woke” for The Operator and the Dictator – Christian O., Fehime S., Magnus N., Naja M., Victor O.
WE EXSIT was awarded “LAN party ready” for Second Impact – Mikkel C., Pål S., Robin A.
JTD was awarded “a 2d contender to They Are Billions” for Pico Pods – Joschka P., Tristan L.
Inside Sunshine was awarded “a jump rope simulator” for Inside Sunshine – Andrea H., Christian C., Emilia L., Gustav B., Gustav J., Jakob H.
Grupp 1 was awarded “a good reason to travel light” for Airport – Anton N., Isak L.
BRIDGE was awarded “the new original sport” for Message In The Bottle – Antony N., Carolina B., Duc D., Leonard M., Matthew B., Nele C., Niels Ø.
??? was awarded “one with them moves” for Disco Deathmatch – Conny N., Morris G., Niklas A.
Normies was awarded “a 360 no scoper” for Sub’s Mayday – Andreas S., Erik W.
Not Tom was awarded “a trinary binary experience” for Byte Packer – Tom L.
team me was awarded “artsy fartsy” for ROAM.INSPECT.RESTART – Gabriel J., Ingrid S.
Just Stoffe was awarded “a new party favorite” for A Leap – Kristoffer F.
2 people was awarded “a brief philosophical journey” for – Jonathan H.
Sergio V. was awarded “a lot of frantic rotation” for DadadataStream
Alex C. was awarded “most glimpseful” for 1977: Radio Aut
Jaffar S. was awarded “so bouncy” for BlockR
Torsten H. was awarded “the most tiniest” for Transmixxion

We ended the jam by playing Kristoffer’s A Leap. While it took more than a few tries, 20 of us finally made the perfectly timed leap! Here’s a video of those ~5 mins it took. Editing it was considered but we wanted to preserve the experience

Overall I say this run was a success. From the numbers we noticed that there are quite a few repeats, but also that we are seeing a lot of new faces this year. This is definitely a good sign for things to come. The fancypants infographic below helps detail some of these insights along with quick summaries from previous years

(The statistics have moved to their own page).

Couldn’t get enough photos? Enjoy this slideshow of some of the (like, 25) other action shots we took

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Thank you for a super GGJ17!

There was a lot of satisfying moments throughout this event, and here is a breakdown of how most of it went. As usual we build upon previous years’ experiences and make the most out of it all. The games for this jam can be found at http://globalgamejam.org/2017/jam-sites/malmojamstoo-minc/games. This postmortem will detail some of the things we saw and learned from as organizers.

We experienced a lot more interest and had a lot more participating this year since last year. We almost doubled our repeat jammers which is really, really cool. But this is also partly due to the continually generated interest of the game development community and the events that are growing in increasing popularity. One such event was the Game Startup Academy, a meetup group that focused on starting up a game companies. And it also took place at the jam site at MINC!

We should say here that it was a pleasure sorting things out for the event with MINC. It was very easy to gain permissions, access and know some of the responsibilities for the locale and it worked out supremely well. We were very surprised at how friction-less it all was. We also had a long checklist that got resolved very quickly and eased a lot of our locale concerns. The only problems we had were with the alarms. But they did subside and the situation never got too dire with them, so it went alright. There was a good amount of collective space, and we encouraged groups that used the meeting rooms to leave their doors open during the jam so other’s can feel welcome to chat and network with them.

Our presentation slides which include upload instructions

A quick show of hands during the keynote presentation showed that about half of the participants have come to their first game jam experience. This makes a good indication on bigger events of this kind in future with possibilities to hold workshops that build skills and contacts.

We started mid-November this year, a whole month earlier than last year. Preparations fell back into the old schedule in the last weeks of December, but we can definitely say that we were less stressed on planning and preparations this year.

As Jaffar no longer works at the university it became more difficult to have the jam site there. Making sure we have access cards to non-students, enough internet, power and most of all permission took a lot of time going back-and-forth between emails and people. And some of those issues were alleviated by the fact that Jaffar worked as part of the Malmö University staff. It was also convenient to have him as staff as security guards would visit the jam and would only be understanding if one was on-site and responsible.

We opened registrations 27th of November and had signups the day after. I believe this shows that opening registrations this early was a good initiative. We even had over 100 total registrations for the event, a large increase since last time.

Like last year we used the MalmoJamsToo Facebook for the initial invites, and created the Facebook event as MJT. We had made a new poster that was put up in the university and even in MINC. We offered posters to potential sponsors as well.

our sponsors for the event

Sponsors was a new thing this year for us. As we were at an incubator, it would have been a missed chance to not have in-house sponsors. This included Caliente, Wünderchef and Game City. Food and drink sponsors are so great. We were very grateful for both Caliente and Wünderchef for being part of the jam, and for Tarsier Studios for their contribution. It really does make a difference to have food and drink, especially after the keynote presentation. In future we will try to start talks with sponsors earlier and see about making eating and drinking more convenient for jammers.

Other sponsors that were supporting us include Tobii who gave us an eye tracking device and Massive Entertainment who gave us 6 copies of their latest title The Division. We had a jammer or two try the eye tracking and we will see if we can incorporate it into future jams in some way. We were a bit unprepared for using it specifically this jam to be fair. On the other hand we did have some jam relief and held an hour-long local multiplayer game where winners could get a copy of The Division. We got offered to play (and playtest) Jonathan’s game PUSHGO since he was jamming with us and was working on a local multiplayer game. It was definitely a great choice.

The theme for this Global Game Jam was WAVES (there was also some video content). You can watch the keynote as well if you replay that video. The diversifiers were quite interesting this year as well. GGJ now takes a few weeks and allows people to suggest them via a form, which is smart. It allows for a lot of choices and variety.

The exhibit-style game show stayed this year as well, as well as the beloved certificates. We redesigned some of it’s flair, and chose a cheaper-but-still-sturdy paper to print on. Still kept it to A4 as it still doesn’t need to be cut, and this time we made sure to peek at everyone’s games a few hours before the game show so we don’t stress out during the game show when filling the certificates out. Some new things we tried this year were the appearance of printed role cards and printed tickets. The role cards may be phased out in future though, and we think it’s probably better to incorporate group forming before the jam, seeing that a lot of the group forming seems to take place before the event. Those that want to spontaneously form groups can of course, but most likely do not need role cards from us to do so. Printed tickets will definitely be used again though. At the start of the jam we had a slow start before getting to the check-ins and found that we had a large crowd waiting for us at the door. We had two laptops checking people in and the tickets were confirmations for letting them in. A few people came later and simply didn’t get tickets. We will have to think a bit on how to make latecomers a less messy situation. We already have some ideas for next year on improving this experience though.

We only had one group who finished a tabletop game (there was another who finished half a one but didn’t submit). It was a bit tight on preparing materials to encourage tabletop jamming though we did give some advice to the group that did work on it. It does seem like a tough sell as digital games are a lot more accessible and ‘cleaner’ to make without the jam specifically catering to tabletop. As said before though, making tabletop games does not require any technologies and allows participants to focus on game mechanics, experience and interaction. We do want to plan for a tabletop game jam later this year, so we will see.

This year we dropped streaming Twitch as we weren’t exactly sure how to get equipment for it and spending time to work with it, as we do not have a stream crew this time. I suppose next year’s GGJ will demand that we get some volunteers on-board and to consider how to work all that out with them early. In some ways it was nice to not stream, as we probably need to work on planning the actual stream program to have worthwhile content. There will always be idle times of course, but it would be good to have done some planning that make the streaming experience more lively. We noted similar comments on the last post-mortem actually.

Slack-wise, we got a lot more jammers signed on so that they can see our announcements. We had an integration that we thought would have been nice to use but since jammers are still kind of new to the use of Slack we simply did not even mention it. We couldn’t get more people on Slack this year, but we made sure that at least one person in a group was able to be informed if anything were to come up.

All-in-all this was a super good run. It really does get better every year, and we look forward to the next one every time!

Groups and awards were as follows:
(no name) were awarded “a doomed endeavor” for mountain doom stormEllen J., Sante L., Jon M., Tom L., Johannes L.
(no name) were awarded “fisherman’s friend” for Wave Boat DashJacob K., Lukas J., Emil K.
Alex Camilleri was awarded “an extinction roadtrip” for Anthropocene
8-Bit was awarded “emotional” for SkyskärFredrik P., Henrik P., Alrik H., Bernhard J., Jakob H., Emilia L., Fredrik H., Beatrix M.
ANGEL HAIR was awarded “sinful af” for Fire of LustJoakim L., Anton S., Marcus L.
Blue Chair was awarded “most balanced” for Wave ohoyAjmal A., Mattias W., Hussein T., Jeremy T., Gustav B., Márk M., Gustav J.
Death to Bear was awarded “mindful” – Anders S., Jonathan H.
Emki was awarded “one with the wave” for SandpiperEmil A., Viki P.
GROUP WAVES was awarded with “apeshit” for Monkey BeatsPer M., Victor O., Emil H., Niklas H., Fredrik S., Olof S.
Kilgore Trout Society was awarded “microwave-ready” for Microwave AlchemistHenrik J., Nikolaos T., Niklas S., Emil B., Johan A.
Kriss La Cross was awarded “a duel of fates” for Splash N smashKristoffer F.
Midnight Hub was awarded “most buggiest” for Disco AstronautsErik N., Johan B., Anton S.
Phyosoft Studio was awarded “with a chance of life” for The Cloud of LifeAnders D.
Rymdkraftverk was awarded “the secret drumpf” – Simon L., Robert B., Axel U., Lorentz L., Björn I.
Serenity Now was awarded with “very grabby” for Hooking in spaceRonny T., Emil T., Magnus N.
Soft Sinus was awarded with “a handful” for Ebb&FlodSebastian L., Karl N.
Team Awesomesauce was awarded with “frustratingly calm” for KoiJulia H., Oskar L., Ayla M., Carl S.
Team MJT was awarded with “too crowded” for We Animals Very ElusiveSamanta M., Torsten H., Jaffar S., Job Z.
Team Westboro Baptist Church was awarded with “Best of both sports” for Sumo Soccer CupJames N., Benjamin P., Emal G.
The Party of Six was awarded with “tectonic shepherd” for Shockwave Shepherds!Andreas H., Tristan L., Vykintas K., Daniel D., Richard M., Eric T.
Tommy Soft was awarded with “worse than waterboarding” for Trump: Road to the White HouseTim L., Simon B., Patrik N., Adam A.
Yoyodyne Team was awarded with “a raindance” for Billy the DropGabriel J., Raya D., Nicole C., Petter E.

(The statistics have moved to their own page).

Thank you for an amazing GGJ16!

IMG_20160131_164948

It was that time of year again, and MalmoJamsToo stepped it up a bit this Global Game Jam. We were very excited to have more participants and more fun this time around. The event itself has grown, and we also noticed quite a few things ourselves, which this post-mortem will touch upon.

We had a significant increase in number this year, and is in no small part thanks to the growing community and events surrounding game development here in Malmö. These range from super friendly game developer meetups to events specifically geared towards encouraging others to check out what’s happening in the game industry. On top of that, we have made good on our efforts to let people know about the event in very good time. We started December 14th, and opened up registrations from the 19th, which gives an extra two weeks and is before the holidays starting. This meant people were able to plan and prepare for it and was less of a spontaneous invite. In any case, we saw an increase of participants to 73, which is almost twice as much as our 45 from last year.

After our recent decision of bringing our three and a half year local sketch jams and the game jams together forming MJT, we took to creating a Facebook event hosted by our transformed Community page. This made up most of our outreach, with the addition of printing out a poster advertising the event which is also something new for us with GGJ. In the past we relied on word of mouth and some really good networking to tap into potential participants. Using the Facebook event made it much clearer and easier to see how people were reacting after we sent out the initial invites through email and how fast we got interest and following.

So the games that were uploaded can be found at the GGJ jam site. If you want to see previous posts about this jam, go to the Previous Jams menu at the top of the site, or follow this link.

The theme for the jam was RITUAL, and there were additional diversifiers that participants could take on.

IMG_20160130_010215

We recycled a bit of our presentations but still kept it fresh. I think for next year we should plan to simplify the upload process as the official GGJ16 one was a mouthful and needs a lot of clarification. There were two keynotes, and they offered good, solid advice.

As per usual, we kept to the same format as the previous years. The exhibit-style game show is still the preferred type of presentations and we kept the evening hangout times from 19—22:00. We have learned from the last game jam that the game show should be kept to an hour. A lot of this stems from participants lingering with nothing to do if they have exhausted their game viewing and networking. Our custom certificates made a return, and this time they were printed on thicker paper and left as A4 instead of A5. This both upped the quality of last year’s certificates, and made for less work as they only needed to be filled in and did not need to be cut.

We had two potential groups who were doing table top games this year. We attempted to follow up from our Card/Board Game Jam a little with some materials for prototyping, though we should work on making it clear that we want to support that. We also had some last minute logistic problems so for next time we will squeeze in time to sort and encourage more groups to try table top prototyping. One of the nicest things with card and boardgames is that participants can focus and work on the game mechanics since there are no technological barriers (some technical knowledge would go a long way though).

Something we brought on-board this year was Twitch streaming, which was exciting and totally new for us. We assembled a Twitch crew who took care of the live stream and gave them free hands in documenting the game jam in other ways, suggesting interviews and the hello video. We will probably explore how to make for a better experience for next year, but we really appreciated the work Anton, Benjamin, Freyja, Rasmus and Victoria put in! Delegating work specifically to a dedicated media team was a good idea. I think with some more careful instruction we can make the Twitch channel a lot more alive and that will definitely up the quality of the delivery as well.

The Twitch stats were as follows (copied from Jo Summers on Slack)

Global Game Jam Channel:
37,300 uniques, 6,900 from front page promotion
102,340 views, 27,860 from front page promotion
1,283,300 minutes watched

Global Game Jam category
74,100 uniques
251,440 views
2,149,700 minutes watched
187 unique streamers to the category

Pretty interesting statistics to look at. We were able to get a stream that lasted for most of the jam, and included time for interviews. A side effect from streaming that we liked was that the cameras pointing toward the event added an extra layer of security. Another side effect was the experience of seeing the building shut down on us. For a brief moment of the jam, on the first night no less, we experienced a game jam in the dark. We did make light of the situation (wink) the best we can, and soon enough we got our lights back on for the rest of the jam.

MJTinthedark_1454103835

We had 21 groups this year and we also attempted to use Slack for sending out communications. I think for a first time this was super successful. It encouraged more fluid chat from our side at the very least, though we should probably work on getting more fluid chat in general for future events. Out of the 73 that stayed, 54 (73.97%) were on Slack. We also made sure that at least one group member from each group had joined Slack so they can relay information to others as necessary.

Since we moved location to the Niagara building, we have good jam space that is adequately heated and lit. This meant we shifted to a more collective jam space which is something new and fresh from previous years. At first, the sofas that were being used quartered off participants, but it was encouraged to change their configuration from a box to a v-shape instead. This was a very nice and noticeable change as others were welcome to see everyone as much as each group could see themselves as part of a bigger event.

The groups were as follows:

1. Mynn Alrik H. David R. Emilia L. Fredrik H. Henrik P. Sofia P.
2. Radical Remorse Alexander B. Andreas K. Beatrix M. Daniel B. Hugo T. Joakim L.
3. Aztortion André L. Angelo L. Björn I. Daniel L. Josef N.
4. Journey To Viking Nirvana Axel B. Felix L. Jesper A. Manne W. Mattias A.
5. Kawaii Kingdom Carl S. Jonas K. Julia H. Katarina K. Oskar L.
6. Fatal Sacrifice Emil H. Martin B. Martin G. Nina O. Olof S. Per M.
7. Loading Alex C. Matteo F. Michelle W.
8. Office Rituals Eric T. Gustav J. Simon H. Tristan L.
9. Zeal the deal Ellen J. Johannes L. Sante L. Tom L.
10. Chronologicum Demonus Gustav R. Magnus A. Robert T. Patrik J.
11. KaffeKombatâ„¢ Markus B. Viktor H.
12. Arrow raid Andreas S. Kristoffer F.
13. Rituals of the Void Christian G. Jonathan H.
14. Liars Colors Anders D.
15. Erik N.
16. Cliffual Hussein T.
17. James N.
18. Fake Science Johan B.
19. Cultish Converts Jaffar S. Job Z. Samanta M. Torsten H.
20. The Path Ana G. Sebastien B.
21. Neighborhood Watch Henrik J. Magnus G. Shailesh P.

All in all, this was a great run. I hope what we learned and tried out this year continues to grow and be better in the next jams. In fact, judging from our similar reactions and excitement, we’re looking forward to it! 🙂

As usual, below is a fancypants infographic about how our event went.

(A better overview of the statistics has its own page).

Thank you for a marvelous MJT2015!

We were really happy with the turnout and run for this last jam, which focused on physical card and board games. What follows is a postmortem of the jam experience from our side. The games for this jam can be found at http://itch.io/jam/mjt2015. If you want to see previous posts about this jam, go to the Previous Jams menu at the top of the site, or follow this link.

The theme for the jam was Time Travel Frenemies, exemplified by these slides-made-into-a-gif:

We kept presentations short and sweet, and imparted some quick advice on working with materials. We reposted our paper prototyping link and added more content with some prototyping advice, which included thoughts on playtesting, mechanics and ideas along with a documentation tip.

Apart from that, we had a super healthy supply of materials and even a black&white laserjet printer on hand which installed it’s own drivers via USB!

A lot of the things we learnt from previous jams applied quite nicely to this jam, so we kept to the format that works. We even kept the exhibit-style game show and attempted to extend the time it lasted by an hour, attempting to accommodate the eventual card and board games. In hindsight, and as we encouraged, it was best to playtest these games before the game show, leaving that extra hour to be a bit too long. Next time we host a card/board game jam like this, we’ll keep the show to an hour, and let those who want to keep playing afterwards the chance to (as much as they are willing). This would of course mean we would book the room for an extra hour, but officially end an hour earlier.

We did personalized award certificates this jam just like we did during the GGJ2015. They were oddly appropriate and an appreciated sight for participants. It’s quite cool to have something that states you were part of the jam in any case. 🙂

We got some action shots too! One of the coolest feelings we personally had that impacted us most was the atmosphere of the jam. It’s quite a different feeling when creating physical games.

The following shows the teams and their entries to the Card/Board Game Jam 2015:

1. Paradoxonauts Frej R. Rasmus Ö. Sofia P. Anders D.
2. Time Trackers Alrik H. David R. Linnea M.
3. Fria sinnet Björn O. Rauli S. Martin W. Per D.
4. There’s not enough rum Jaffar S. Samanta M. Torsten H.
5. temporal legue Eric L. David A. Gustaf A. Peter G. Henrik D.
6. Lost in Time Marie B. Dennis J. Luka L.

We would also like to send a shout out to Malmö University for letting us have the jam at their workshop, and for generally being great in supporting our plans for the event. Special thanks also go to Johannes Nilsson for helping us in the workshop and giving us an introduction to 3D printing.

If you are interested in future game jams we are hosting or other related workshops from MalmöJamsToo, you may choose to subscribe to us by contacting our email with the subject “subscribe” (we promise to only inform you of events/workshops only!). Below is a fancypants infographic about how our event went.