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:

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.

(A better overview of the statistics can be viewed on its own page).

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!