Ø11 A Jam full of Games
Ø11 A Jam full of Games
A game jam across the globe, conversations in the Twitter sphere, and working on crafts with your kids can tech you critical collaboration skills.
Welcome to another issue of Sweet Newsletter, Man! This issue I’m going to share a bit about our first experience using Twitter spaces. Making valentines day crafts with my two daughters, and the Global Game Jam.
Twitter Spaces
Twitter had launched spaces in what seemed like a response to the popularity of Clubhouse, an audio community channel. If you’re not sure what Twitter spaces or Clubhouse are let me explain. Spaces and Clubhouse allow anyone to create sort of a virtual audio-only forum, they act as a moderator and can invite others to speak.
You might ask, so it’s like a podcast? Well not really, it’s closer to the radio. It’s live, no recording unless you ask for the recording to be saved. You can’t edit it however and you’re doing this all from your phone.
As a design team, we thought this new format was really interesting for some of our design conversations. We’ve done plenty of videos, live streams, and in-person talks pre-pandemic. With minimal preparations, the team could jump in and start talking about something that was relevant to our community.
For this first space, we decided to redo our conversation on design team culture. A handful of people joined us as listeners, as my first time hosting I didn’t really know the proper format or how engaging with the audience really worked. Something I can work on for our next one.
As a team hosting a Twitter space was really valuable. The lower overhead that comes with this format is exciting and could lead to use having more opportunities to engage with the design community. We’ve got more planned in the future, so just follow Headway or me on Twitter to get a notification of our next space.
Valentines Boxes
It’s that time of the year when we get to go to Target and pick out the next holiday items. My children have already told me that we need to have valentines decorations the day we took down our Christmas decorations.
This year I was in charge of making the boxes that go to school. We went to the craft store, where they don’t just have character stickers, but they have scrapbooking packs. I thought to myself, oh well we’ll make something awesome out of these.
Once we got home we started to build our boxes, I helped with the stickers and I was in charge of the hot gluing. Since there was a lot of hot gluing I was doing a lot of the work. I could see my oldest wasn’t having much fun. “we were supposed to do this together” she exclaimed.
She was right, I was sort of taking it over and making all of the decisions. I realized at that moment that she didn’t care so much about the end product but that we were building it together. So I grabbed some crayons and markers that we had at home.
She was excited to draw on her flowers and have me add the hot glued gemstones here and there where she wanted and in the end, she was ecstatic with her box.
Reflecting on this I think it’s easy for us to take things over as creative types or people who just want to be in control. We’d much rather do it ourselves so we can feel like it’s done right. But at its core, that’s not what collaboration looks like. It’s about conversation and working together. The success isn’t how the final thing might look but that it’s got bits and pieces from everyone in it. This is something
Global Game Jam
In downtown Green Bay, close to the river, there is a red brick building with a tall yellow smokestack. Branded by the current tenant, Titletown brewery. This towering monument to beer leads you to the entrance of this community of businesses.
Once inside, up a ramp, past a metal bison, around a hall filled with mailboxes, the bustle of a bakery, finally through a side door next to the elevator that requires a keycard. Through this door are some old stairs that go up and on the second floor is another door which at this time is being propped open with a bottle of water.
Through this door, you finally arrive at the Urban Hub, a business center and rent-able co-working space nestled into the Railyard Districts south building. Tenants are usually entrepreneurs and technology teams, but for the next 48 hours, it’s going to be filled with some students, professors, and working professionals. All game enthusiasts looking to make a game over the weekend.
The Global Game Jam has been hosted here in Green Bay for the better part of 3 or 4 years. It’s traveled from the on-campus facility at the local college to a more centralized location. This year is its largest attendance.
Before the event starts and the theme is revealed The organizers give a small speech before, I am asked to give remarks as well. I play off of something some of the other speakers mentioned, make sure to have fun while trying to explore something new. There is value in this test, but don’t take it too seriously. We only have 48hours to make our games.
The theme is revealed to be duality. Right and wrong, cold and hot, mind and body, all forms of duality. Once revealed we quickly spread out throughout the space to brainstorm our ideas. Certain groups were pre-formed and a few of us broke into brainstorming groups.
In our groups we chat through different ideas and concepts and play off of them together, I was stuck on a game about fire and ice for a while and was struggling to think of anything else. In our small group, we chatted about a garden game with an above-ground and underground component, a game about controlling your body vs mind.
In the last 10 minutes, I remembered the scene in Harry Potter where he’s got the Marauders Map and thought a game where a player has a map and another is playing on the computer might be cool. We as a group riff on that idea a bit before running out of brainstorming time.
Once the time was up we were asked to pitch out games in front of everyone and let everyone know what we're proficient at and what we might need help with. There was a ton of great pitches. A group of teams was using a new 2d engine called Bitsy. There was a game about being a caseworker and another that was going to leverage live-action footage. After all of the ideas were pitched, it was encouraged to mingle into the different groups and form your teams.
Our team gathered interest from a group of first-year programming students who were excited to participate in a game jam, this was their first and they were not sure what to expect. We also had a veteran game jammer who was a proficient programmer who joined as well. Once our team assembled we were off to brainstorm how our game was going to work.
The next 2 days were a bit of a whirlwind in building things, jotting down ideas, writing stories, coding gameplay, making art, scrapping things, and getting excited once things were running in the game. We chose Unity3D as our game engine and it took a while to really come together since everything was in 3d, but we manage to get a great version together before the presentations. We also managed to get a single playtest in and catch a few bugs.
Presentations are personally my favorite part of a game jam. You get to see all of the hard work everyone put into their projects and the variety of ideas. Each game was unique and took the theme in different directions. It’s exciting to take on these small weekend jams. An opportunity to work and meet new people, sharing ideas, and building something together as a collective. Really working in an unbridled creative flow, no motivations beyond making something exciting.
If you ever have the opportunity to get into a hackathon, game jam, or a startup weekend I highly recommend you take the opportunity to do so. You’ll test yourself and have a great time.
If you’d like to download and play our game, we have it hosted here on the Global Game Jam site. If you’d like to see all of the other games from our site follow this link here.
New Portfolio Work
I finally posted some work that I’ve done for our client Demiplane. This is an early mock-up for the adventure portal. The goal was to provide players with a single location for their adventures.
Inspo Central
As always, hope everyone has a great rest of their month! I know this was a bit of a long one, I hope you enjoy it and as always would love your feedback!
- Billy
PS Section
So I just watched the French Dispatch and you need to check out this prop-building video.
I also just started to play Spider-man Miles Morales and I’m loving the swing mechanics in this game.
Finally, the best episodes of Boba stared the Mando?!