We have gotten a lot bigger since last year, and still had a great time! What follows is a postmortem of the jam experience from our side. The games for this year can be found at http://globalgamejam.org/2015/jam-sites/malmö-university/games (you can also see 2014 entries by changing the year in the link).
Since last year, we planned to start a month earlier in planning. But apparently planning in November really was not as optimal as we thought (partially because there’s quite a few birthdays to celebrate that month). It’s not easy to plan an event when cake is on the line. So if we will organize next year’s event, we will start planning October, which coincidentally is when sites can begin registering on the GGJ website. This allows us to plan for workshops and perhaps even get sponsors leading up to the event.
One thing we did release before the event was a Paper Prototyping post which hopefully inspired some of you to check out what it means to rapidly prototype on paper, and a printable PDF checklist which we hope was somewhat helpful. We did not really get feedback on these things, but these still make great resources for future use.
Since we didn’t have a speaker this year, we decided to hold the presentation before the keynote. It got a lot of practical stuff out of the way too, and we included tips for first timers as well (thanks to Sabrina from pigda/Pittsburgh for the presentation which helped fuel that). It’s also our first time declaring that no one leaves the room until everyone has a group. I think that went over well and things worked out in the end.
Instead of presentations at the end we did a game show this year, an exhibit-style show which allowed you guys to play the games you made. We totally prefer this over presentations. From our experience presentations are very tiresome at the end of an event and a mostly sleepless weekend. The time it takes to present is multiplied by the amount of games, and that makes even us grumble. Plus you get to show off what you spent 48 hours making, that’s seriously a fantastic feeling.
Instead of making the event too much about competition, we opted to give everyone a personalized certificate with their own award. We did not expect that it would be so stressful to write in the award titles in such a short time, but luckily we gave out certificates to every team with a game but a certain team of three, who left early unfortunately. There’s an infographic below which shows which award each team got. We had fun making up award names on the spot. One other thing we did was hand out roles at check-in, which we hoped would speed up the group forming process after the theme reveal.
For organizing most of the event we used a lot of Google Drive stuff. From presentations, to registration forms, to keeping track of registrations, e-mails, to-dos, even a timeline of what kind of responses we were giving out and how! It was really ideal. So we’ll keep using that in future. We sent out a total of 5-7 e-mails this event/user, which was totally under the expected limit of 10-15 (we’re happy about that).
We also noted that you were comfortable in your rooms and really got into the spirit of jamming. We should probably have taken way more photos of you getting into your element, but we at least got some sweet action shots!
Anyways, you may see how the Hello video for 2016 looks here https://malmojamstoo.com/files/MalmoSweden_GGJHello2016.mp4, which is a happy first for us.
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 e-mail with the subject “subscribe” (we promise to only inform you of events/workshops only!). Below is a fancypants infographic about how our GGJ2015 event went.
(A better overview of the statistics can be viewed on its own page).
