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.
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.