Over the weekend of June 17th I finally partook in my first game jam. I’ve helped out a many a Global Game Jam but finally thought that yeah sure my game coding skills are very lackluster and normalized databases don’t make for good gameplay but when I head Full Indie was holding it’s first ever game jam I just knew I had to give it a go.

I honestly had no idea what I could put my skills to and had a creeping feeling that I’d be useless to any team, have to learn something completely new in 48 hours or a bit of both. This feeling was calmed a little bit when I was at an IGDA Vancouver meet up at Radical Entertainment the Tuesday before and met James Karg (@Twisted_majic) who was also taking part in the Full Indie game jam and we batted around some ideas about Twitter. On D-Day we got talking again and with the inclusion of Cody Labossiere (@codylabossiere) we started to hammer out any ideas that came into our heads. (I had met Cody previously at another Full Indie meet up).

The main theme given to us was “Spawning”. This was due to it being Fathers Day on the Sunday and all fathers have spawn little mini thems. As you can  see from the photo above we just went with any idea relating to spawning we could think of, even Kevin Bacon got mentioned. Once some core themes were out there we started on any game idea we could think of, these ranged from god games to fertilization. We kept trying to think of better core concepts but it just wasn’t happening, once bacon was mentioned earlier pizza was soon planted in our heads and this made our stomachs growl like nothing else so we decided on a small break and some food.

Once we had pizza half stuffed in our faces we knew we were missing something ….. beer. So a quick trip back to the jam via a liquor store we were sorted. We kind of all agreed to drop all the half ideas we had and just do something with Twitter. Only a half full of half “maybe …” sentences later and we came up with a word battle fighting game. #Fighter was born. (that’s not the final name. actually it’s not even a working name, I just thought of it now).

The premise of the game is to sign up easily using your Twitter account and then challenge friends using keyword hash tags and then just do battle using Twitter, somewhat, normally using predefined hashtags as battle commands. This is all record by our server and then determines the winner. A simple conceptual idea I had for explaining it, Pokemon but through Twitter, and less animal cruelty. It is a rather simplistic core concept but we all had very busy weekend plans besides the game jam, which involved drinking, and so the game never got to a working state. I do apologize for  this as it was my coding skills that weren’t able to deliver in a short time frame. Though I do believe that with only an hour or two of work I can get it working in some form. I really just need to set some time aside for it.

The Full Indie game jam was a brilliant experience and I cannot wait for the next one to come up. Hopefully then I will not have so many beers and other plans on the weekend and actually come out with a working prototype. Until next time #KAPOW!!!! Also photo credit and beer cheers to Chevy Ray Johnston (@ChevyRay)