We did a GameJam! (Patreon)

Hi everyone! At the weekend, we hosted the first GMTK GameJam - a 48 hour game making competition where developers try to quickly bash together a game, based on a theme. 

The theme was one of my videos: the Downwell’s Dual Purpose Design video, which was about how single mechanics can have multiple outcomes, leading to interesting trade-offs, decisions, incentives, and gameplay. 

Even though we had 3000 sign-ups, I predicted that only about 50 people would enter a game. 200 as a very optimistic prediction. I thought in my head that if I could say in the follow-up video that we had 300-odd games entered, it would sound mighty impressive. 

We had 766 entries. 

Wow! That’s a crap tonne of games. Every single one was handcrafted, carefully designed, and created with intelligence and dedication. The response has been absolutely mind-blowing. 

I’ve been playing the games - I’ve done 6 hours of live-streaming games already this week - and have just been blown away. I haven’t had a chance to really process the whole thing, it’s just so surreal. But I’m so proud that this is part of the weird GMTK experiment. 

I’ve always thought about ways it could expand beyond just YouTube videos, and this is a great start. 

Anyway, myself, and a brilliant team of Patron volunteers, have been playing games like crazy trying to find the very best so I can show them off in a video. It’s hard, time consuming work. And so, basically, that’s where I am at the moment. In a spreadsheet, assigning numbers to games!

And finally, I want to give a thank you to Aaron for setting the jam up, everyone in the #gamedev room in the Discord for providing ideas and help, my judges, and of course everyone who took the time to make a game - whether you finished and submitted or not. 

What else is happening?

I'm working on a normal video during all this. Out next week, I reckon. A nice pithy video on one part of Ori and the Blind Forest.

Speaking of which, the GameClub for Ori kicks off on Monday. Discord is the best place to chat about this. We also have a Discord room for OneShot and the developers of the game are in there, chatting away to Patrons.

And then once all of this is done, I'm going to finally get back to Boss Keys. It's been a while! (But I think I'll need a bit of a break after all this nonsense).

Bye for now

Mark