What do you get when you combine the ideas of a musician “jam session” and video game development? The result is an event that Kennesaw State University has hosted a staggering 14 times known as a “Game Jam.”
KSU’s Marietta Campus was the site for last weekend’s 2015 Fall Georgia Game Jam, which hosted more than 170 students, alumni and community partners. The participating teams built a total of 24 games focused on the event’s theme of “The Sum of Our Parts.”
During the jam, the teams, some of which consisted of a single creator, planned and built their own playable video games. The contest lasted 48 hours, with development starting at 5 p.m. Friday and concluding at 5 p.m. Sunday. This led to many participants bundling up in sleeping clothes, robes and even shark hoodies. If you weren’t one of the dozens of participants pulling all-nighters, you were taking power naps on the cold, hard floor.
After completing their games, seven winning teams were selected to earn free passes to attend the October Southern Interactive Entertainment and Games Expo (SIEGE) in Atlanta.
Winning team Coconut Monkey’s “Tiny Robot” lets players “explore the robot waste” in a side-scrolling platformer. Players are tasked with finding robot parts to level up their character and progress through the level. It features simple, yet accessible 2D graphics that prove that what’s old is new again.
The single member team Garrett consisting of Garrett Leach created a game called “Assimilation.” Garrett’s game is a multiplayer digital card game in which players each play as their own alien species with the goal of assimilating as many humans as possible. It is a turn-based game where players choose to eat to survive or kill humans to assimilate them and grow stronger.
In Team Swagga Muffin’s “The Architect,” players guide a humanoid robot through a maze while pointing and clicking on a birds-eye view of the maze.
Team Build for the Stars created a game with their team’s name as the title, “Build for the Stars.” In Build’s game, players use a crane to stack objects in a physics-based environment. The goal is to stack enough objects to form a tower reaching into space.
A game was also selected to win the Game Jam Achievement Award. The award was given to Team Sharks, who had the “most complete game that best fit the theme.” Team Sharks’ game, “Fite 4 Sumthing,” is a side-scrolling combat platformer in which iconic figures from human history such as Joan of Arc and Clint Eastwood are brought into the future to fight off aliens. The game uses colorful and endearing hand-drawn art in everything from the character models to the control interface at the top of the screen.
This was the first Game Jam held since KSU and SPSU consolidated in January. The talents of both campuses were combined. Students from both the College of Computing and Software Engineering and the College of the Arts brought together technical expertise with artistic creativity.
Both KSU campuses are set to host the Atlanta Code Camp in October, where students can further hone their game development skills. These skills can then be put to use when Atlanta hosts a Global Game Jam in January 2016, in which more than 300 attendees are expected.
