As I mentioned before, I will be participating in this weekend’s Global Game Jam. Essentially the video game development community’s answer to the 48 hour film project, the Game Jam is a collaborative game-making effort that will run from 5pm on Friday the 29th through the afternoon of Sunday the 31st, at which point we will have made a video game or died trying. The design constraints and theme of the jam will be announced on Friday, so until we form a team that afternoon I cannot anticipate who I will be working with or what kind of game we will make. That said, I will be jamming with the other folks at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, and they have a hell of a lineup of participants this year—very excited for the weekend. I will be contributing my 2D and 3D skills and limited scripting, as well as taking a first stab at music production and sound design.
I got involved with the Game Jam through my participation in the Boston Postmortem IGDA meetings in general, and the Boston Indies independent game development meetup in particular. This past evening I attended a Boston Indies event in which Eitan Glinert of Fire Hose Games discussed the process of submitting their current project, Slam Bolt Scrappers, to the Independent Games Festival competition. Eitan’s presentation had some interesting points that I will be posting in the near future, but for now you should follow @FireHoseGames and check out the Slam Bolt Scrappers site for more information.
Additional shout-outs to Kristina Drzaic, formerly of 2K Australia and now at the once-again-Irrational Games, and Amanda Cosmos, a QA tester at Turbine and generally cool person.