Thousands of participants around the world formed teams to create computer games from scratch within 48 hours at the Global Game Jam on January 29-31, 2010. Several of the local digital media schools and programs were represented, including BCIT, Emily Carr, SFU, UBC and Masters of Digital Media, as well as a few local studios including United Front Games and Propaganda Entertainment.
A group of four students from School of Computing’s new Games Development Degree, (Ranyl Bantog, Jim Slemin, Vili Petek and Brian Hume) formed a team and created a game called Mimic. “The theme given this year was Deception, explained Ranyl, “along with some constraints where either a punk, skunk or a monk had to be incorporated in the game.”
“Jim Slemin came up with the idea of four different colonies of cells battling it out in a Petri dish,” accounted Ranyl, “and it evolved into the game idea that we ended up with. The deception comes to play as the player’s cell (the virus) mimics the other cells abilities thus deceiving them to think you are allies so they won’t attack you. The skunk, punk, and monk ideas were incorporated as the different cell types which had their own unique attacks and behaviors. We were also very lucky to work with a talented local artist/animator Tyler Schroeder who put out high quality art works for the game.”
Although it was more of a collaborative event than competitive, each group had an opportunity to demonstrate their game to the other participants and local judges for an honest critique. The judges gave feedback based on educational and entertainment value, technology, creativity, innovation, graphic design, completeness, general creativity and design.
"Towards the end, I realized that our team was the only one that coded from the ground up using the XNA platform without using any commercial game engines,” observed Ranyl. “We wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without the basic foundations of games programming we’ve learned from the program. It was a great collaborative event and we were able to make contacts with artists and game designers to contract for future commercial game development. For next year’s GGJ event at BCIT we will be sure to split up and spread the coding talent among the different teams.”
Elsie Au, CST BTech program head said,”GGJ provides an excellent opportunity for our students to meet and network with the local games industry; as well as show case what they have learned and what they can do, so far.”
BCIT sponsored the local event and will host the event in 2011.
Pat McGee, BCIT Games instructor and liaison in the GGJ organizing committee, said, ”It was a great weekend. I made several helpful contacts and we definitely got the message out about our program in addition to having good collaboration with the other participating institutions. It was also helpful for me to observe the entire weekend to be ready for next year when we host it.”
Global Game Jam countdown:
- 4,338 gamers registered globally for this year’s event (vs. 1,600 participants in the first year, 2008)
- 928 games created over this year’s event (vs. 370 games produced the first year, 2008)
- 35 Vancouver jammers participated this year at UBC and Vancouver Hacker Space
- 48 hours to create games
- 39 countries, from Argentina to Wales, took part this year (vs. 23 countries participated in 2009)
