These frigid winter weekends we've been having here in New York City present plenty of opportunities to stay indoors and catch up on some quality videogame time. But some students at NYU Tisch would much rather spend their snow days making the games themselves. And they aren't alone — The crowds of game developers that hunkered down in front of laptops at NYU's Game Center in late January were taking part in the Global Game Jam, an annual game-making marathon that occurs simultaneously around the world.Macbooks, junk food and various caffeinated beverages predictably covered most of the flat surfaces on the 9th floor of the Tisch building in downtown Manhattan as over a hundred amateur & pro game designers organized into groups for their own version of the New York Marathon: Making a fully-functional game, from concept to completion, in 48 hours.
It's a daunting task, one that perhaps seems impossible to those with little or no coding experience. But with new technologies and software that streamline the technical aspects of game creation, startup developers are finding themselves free to focus on fashioning creative (and sometimes very strange) new ideas into interactive works.Ramiro Corbetto, who we speak with in the video below, is no stranger to this intense but rewarding workflow. He and his studio, Powerhead Games, won last year's Independent Games Festival award for Best Mobile Game with Glow Artisan, a game that turns images into color-based puzzles. For this year's Game Jam, he's making a dating simulator. With polar bears.After all was said and done, local indie game hub Babycastles displayed four of the best NYU games at their next basement arcade event, including Root, a game that puts you in control of a plant's struggle for survival beneath the ground, and S.E.X. Simulator, an interactive ecosystem that charges players with balancing all elements of a planet's biosphere.Whether from Sao Paulo, Sydney, Copenhagen or New York City, Global Game Jam's projects showcase an enormous variety of ideas derived from a common theme. So many that it'll probably take most of us till next year's Game Jam to check out just half of the projects that were birthed during those two days in January.
The IGDA has hosted a massive listing of everything made during this year's Jam on their website, divided up by category, country and city. Some even received "achievements" for completing some optional challenges, a la Xbox Live. Some are just sketches or proofs-of-concept. Others are finished products, ready to be released on the net or elsewhere. But a great deal of projects from both categories find common ground in their desire to experiment with the form and language of videogames.The eyes of the game-developing world will turn to San Francisco next week when the Game Developers Conference commences its massive annual mindmeld. Check back here between March 2nd – 6th as Motherboard goes head-first into the fray to see what today's videogames are really made of.More Design & Experimental Gameplay:Learn Game Design By Playing With Legos
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It Gets Better: Games About Suicide & Divorce
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