Monday, January 31, 2011

Global Game Jam 2011

Last weekend was made of small amount of sleep and lots of game development. In about thirty hours we designed and implemented a game, Hamsters and Plague. It's a tile-based puzzle game about the survival of hamsters after a plague. You can find information on the game from our project page. I have also started a blog for future development and other related discussion.

Making a game in such a short time is awesome in many ways. Especially learning. I will try to make a proper post mortem on our project when I'm less tired (later this week) and post it to the Hamsters and Plague blog. Naturally it's also important for my research to have actual game development experience. I once again realized how hard it is to evaluate learnability of something made by yourself and our game definitely could do a better job. Which I hope it will do in the future if I have the time to develop it further.

I'm also thinking that something like this would be a really good way to teach programming and team development. A rather tight time limit does wonders to motivation, at least when the topic is one that interests everyone. While school environment doesn't support over-the-weekend courses very well, something similar should be possible. Maybe we could give students credit points for participating in next year's Global Game Jam.

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