Global Game Jam 2015

jholopainen / / Development, Events

We again hosted an official site of the Global Game Jam, in space kindly provided by the School of Computer Science. This year we had over 50 jammers join us from all over the UK in what is becoming our favourite weekend of the year.

The Global Game Jam is the world’s biggest hackathon and this year saw over 28000 jammers work in 518 locations in 78 countries, simultaneously spending 48 hours creating 5437 brand new games. This year the theme was the simple question “What do we do now?”, which served as inspiration for a wide variety of games from imaginary skipping ropes, through idol worship simulators, co-op platformers, games of celtic mysticism and even a game that uses a real coffin as a controller. I prepared a short video of the many highlights to give a taste for the weekend:

You can see all 19 games created on the University of Lincoln page on the Global Game Jam site. All games are open source and downloadable for free – please give them a go!

Special thanks to Matt Ashton, technician for the School of Computer Science, for support and patience over the whole weekend, plus the School of Computer Science for loan of the space and expenses, and the University of Lincoln Computing Society for helping manage and organise the event. And of course thanks to all the jammers for making such a fun weekend!

Global Game Jam 2015

jholopainen / / Uncategorized

GGJ15 generic

The Lincoln Games Research Group, Lincoln School of Computer Science and the University of Lincoln Computing Society are proud to again be hosting an official site of the Global Game Jam.

The Global Game Jam is the largest hackathon in the world, and on the weekend of 23rd to 25th January 2015, thousands of jammers will be working simultaneously in hundreds of locations around the world.

Our official site will be open for the full 48 hours of the jam, in space kindly provided by the School of Computer Science. Attendance is free but you must register a ticket in advance. We are limited by space and tickets will run out! Last year we were pleased to welcome visitors from other universities and game studios from around the region.

For more information on the jam visit the central Global Game Jam website, and see our page on the GGJ directory.
Register for your ticket on our Eventbrite page.

If you have any questions about participation, travel or eligibility please contact the site coordinator, Ben Kirman.

24 Hour Game Jam: 18th & 19th October 2014

jholopainen / / Uncategorized

We are pleased to announce that Sean Oxspring will be running a 24 hour game jam with ULCS on the 18th and 19th of October, 2014. This will be the first game jam of many scattered throughout the year for our students to enter and enjoy!

The game jam will start at 9:00am on the Saturday and run over 24 hours. Participants should arrive in Lab B at 9:00am, so that the theme can be revealed at precisely 10:00am – the jam will then run over 24 hours until 10:00am on the Sunday. Judging will take place at 12:00 and continue till all the entries are seen and awards given!

If you haven’t participated in a jam before, you will find them useful for several reasons:
• They get you to try out new ideas and development processes.
• They give you excellent portfolio pieces and finished games.
• They get you working in a team under a very tight schedule.
• They’re really quite fun!

You can sign up for the game jam here.
Look forward to seeing you on the 18th!

Global Game Jam 2014 – Thanks!

jholopainen / / Announcements

Now we have had a chance to get back to normal sleep patterns and perhaps feel mostly human again, we wanted to thank you guys for participating in the Global Game Jam with us at the School of Computer Science, University of Lincoln.

Although we have hosted many Game Jams before (e.g. CanJam 2014, #7DGJ) this was our first Global Game Jam and, for us organisers at least, enormous fun to be part of such an enormous global event. We have got literally hundreds of emails from other site organisers sharing similar sentiments and stories.

A total of fourteen games were uploaded to our Global Game Jam Site, that cover a range of platforms and range. A special shout-out to those of you that took on extra challenge by making games in languages and engines you had never used before – there was even work on the SNES! Some of the submissions even got mentioned on Edge Online!

Hopefully even those of you that couldn’t quite finish your game still had fun and found the experience rewarding.

In total there were 23499 jammers globally, simultaneously working on 4283 games at 488 sites in 72 different countries. You can explore this massive collection on the GGJ site!

Thanks again for taking time out of your busy lives to be participate, especially those of you that travelled across the arable hinterland of Lincolnshire to be with us. It was fantastic to have you here and I apologise again if you got a bit cold!

If you have any more materials about the GGJ in Lincoln (e.g. pictures, youtube links, newslinks etc.) feel free to share them with us!