It’s soon time for Global Game Jam 2020! We’ll have it again at Game Habitat’s DevHub

Really quick, what’s a game jam?

An event where you meet up with others to attempt making a game within a limited time on decided themes/constraints. Join one to learn, network, be productive and to have an enjoyable time! Similar to hackathons but for games and playful prototypes. The Global Game Jam is an annual global event that takes place at physical locations and puts a lot of emphasis on collaboration, experimentation and innovation.
Read more at globalgamejam.org

Game jam registration

1. Registrations close when the jam starts.
   So join the jam soon as you’re able to so we can accommodate you!
2. We use Discord to communicate with everyone.
3. Follow our Facebook page for event reminders, if you want to.
4. As it’s a Global Game Jam event we also follow their policies:
   Inclusiveness Policy and Code of Conduct
5. Also register if you want to help volunteer in any capacity
   (or join the Discord directly and message evnh#7915).

Logistics

Building Access
We’ll be at the reception to buzz you in between 16:00–18:00. If there’s no response to ringing the doorbell you can ping me on Discord (evnh#7915) or call the number on the door. The jam will take place at a single main area (with options to use certain rooms and other areas)

Internet Access – We’ll have good enough access without worry

Sleeping – because of the security issues involved, we’ll recommend “napping”. There’ll be spaces for “napping” quite peacefully

Restaurants – Gustav Adolfs Torg + Lilla torget + Centralstation/Triangeln have plenty of restaurants. They’re everywhere!

Other stores – like Kjell, Panduro and Matton are also nearby and are open during the early afternoons. Triangeln also has a few purposeful stores

Schedule

[This schedule is liable to change]

Location

The building’s address is Torggatan 2, Malmö at Gustav Adolfs Torg

Bus numbers 2, 4, 7 and 8 all go to Gustav Adolfs Torgs bus stop

Social Media

For those who want to use hashtags tied to our locale, please use #mjt2001 #malmojamstoo #GGJ20

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 infographics or the awards we have below

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

Global Game Jam infographics

Amount of games made each year

Participation breakdown

From the jammers, here is the breakdown of how often they go to game jams each year

A breakdown of the same data between events

Facebook Events stats

Facebook makes it difficult to compare their numbers to actual signups. So note that their numbers are more like estimates

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

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 infographics or the awards we have below

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

Amount of games made each year

Participation breakdown

From the jammers, here is the breakdown of how often they go to game jams each year

A breakdown of the same data between events

Facebook Events stats

Facebook makes it difficult to compare their numbers to actual signups. So note that their numbers are more like estimates

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

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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.

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 storm – Ellen J., Sante L., Jon M., Tom L., Johannes L.
(no name) were awarded “fisherman’s friend” for Wave Boat Dash – Jacob K., Lukas J., Emil K.
Alex Camilleri was awarded “an extinction roadtrip” for Anthropocene
8-Bit was awarded “emotional” for Skyskär – Fredrik P., Henrik P., Alrik H., Bernhard J., Jakob H., Emilia L., Fredrik H., Beatrix M.
ANGEL HAIR was awarded “sinful af” for Fire of Lust – Joakim L., Anton S., Marcus L.
Blue Chair was awarded “most balanced” for Wave ohoy – Ajmal 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 Sandpiper – Emil A., Viki P.
GROUP WAVES was awarded with “apeshit” for Monkey Beats – Per M., Victor O., Emil H., Niklas H., Fredrik S., Olof S.
Kilgore Trout Society was awarded “microwave-ready” for Microwave Alchemist – Henrik J., Nikolaos T., Niklas S., Emil B., Johan A.
Kriss La Cross was awarded “a duel of fates” for Splash N smash – Kristoffer F.
Midnight Hub was awarded “most buggiest” for Disco Astronauts – Erik N., Johan B., Anton S.
Phyosoft Studio was awarded “with a chance of life” for The Cloud of Life – Anders 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 space – Ronny T., Emil T., Magnus N.
Soft Sinus was awarded with “a handful” for Ebb&Flod – Sebastian L., Karl N.
Team Awesomesauce was awarded with “frustratingly calm” for Koi – Julia H., Oskar L., Ayla M., Carl S.
Team MJT was awarded with “too crowded” for We Animals Very Elusive – Samanta M., Torsten H., Jaffar S., Job Z.
Team Westboro Baptist Church was awarded with “Best of both sports” for Sumo Soccer Cup – James 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 House – Tim L., Simon B., Patrik N., Adam A.
Yoyodyne Team was awarded with “a raindance” for Billy the Drop – Gabriel J., Raya D., Nicole C., Petter E.

And as usual, we have a fancypants infographic below about how our event went.

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.

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.

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:

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.

It’s begun!

The theme is finally revealed: RITUAL

We are 67-70 people in 20 teams this year, which is an all new high! We’re excited to see what you all create during the event.

Anyways. The game jam teams are as follows:

We also have a Twitch/streaming crew! They are:
Anton B., Benjamin J., Freyja B., Rasmus N. and Victoria L.

Food

• The Central Station in Malmö has some eateries if you want something quick. You’ll find a Coop Nära there.
• During the jam you’ll all have access to the microwave ovens.

Logistics

Internet Access
We will help provide access to internet. The details will be provided at the Jam.

Building Access Cards
For those of you who can not access the premises we’ll make sure that you have 1-2 access cards per group. More details on that at the Jam.

Sleeping
While sleeping at the game jam site is not technically allowed, taking a nap during the game jam should not be a problem.

Registration

Hey! It’s that time of year again and you want to be part of the Global Game Jam 2016. Click below and follow the instructions to get registered and set at our Malmö University jam site:

1. Registrations close up a day before the jam. Please register as soon as you are able so we can help accommodate for you!
2. We’ll add you to a mailing list which will only e-mail you about future events/workshops we have. It’s also super easy to opt-out, and we keep your details private.
3. We will be using Slack to communicate with everyone during the event, but you may also Like and follow our Facebook Community page.

Food

• The Central Station in Malmö has some eateries if you want something quick. You’ll find a Coop Nära there.
• During the jam you’ll all have access to the microwave ovens.

Logistics

Internet Access
We will help provide access to internet. The details will be provided at the Jam.

Building Access Cards
For those of you who can not access the premises we’ll make sure that you have 1-2 access cards per group. More details on that at the Jam.

Sleeping
While sleeping at the game jam site is not technically allowed, taking a nap during the game jam should not be a problem.