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.

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!

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!

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

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

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.

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.

Global Game Jam statistics

YEARS	SITES	COUNTRIES	PARTICIPANTS	GAMES
2020	934	118	48754
2019	860	113	47006	9010
2018	803	108	42800	8606
2017	701	95	36401	7263
2016	632	93	36164	6866
2015	518	78	28800	5438
2014	488	72	23189	4292
2013	319	63	16705	3248
2012	242	47	10684	2209
2011	169	44	6500	1500+
2010	138	39	4300	900
2009	53	23	1650	370

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Our own statistics

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 these values more like estimates

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

Introduction

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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

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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

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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

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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

YEARS	SITES	COUNTRIES	PARTICIPANTS	GAMES
2019	860	113	47007	9000
2018	803	108	42800	8606
2017	701	94	36397	7258
2016	632	93	36000+	6800
2015	518	78	25000+	5000+
2014	488	72	23189	4292
2013	319	63	16705	3248
2012	242	47	10684	2209
2011	169	44	6500	1500+
2010	138	39	4300	900
2009	053	23	1650	370

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

(Our fancypants infographic can be found on the latest GGJ post-mortem)

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.

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.

(Our fancypants infographic can be found on the latest GGJ post-mortem)

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:

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.

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.

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.

It’s been a wild weekend, and you all made it fantastic 😀

Thanks to all the participants, and also those of you who made this possible.
Some of you never been to a game jam, and we hope this will be one of many for the next ones to come.

All eight submissions have me (Torsten) impressed in any case. 🙂
We might poke some of you on your game pages about the format or missing jammers.

Thanks again, and we wish you all a great week ahead!