International Women's Day - Game Jam
All images shown here courtesy of Tom Platinum Morley
All images shown here courtesy of Tom Platinum Morley
The game jam hosted by Confetti on the 8th of March 2023 was a 9-hour long game jam taking place in celebration of International Women's Day. Participants were asked to make a small donation of between £3-5 to a GoFundMe set up in support of local charity Juno Women's Aid. The event was primarily organised by Creative Technologies MA and MSc students, who also provided technical assistance on the day. When the 9-hours was up the judges reviewed the games and tallied up the average scores, the judges then awarded each member of the winning team a £50 Amazon vouchers provided by Confetti.
My Roles
Prior to the Game Jam
Prior to the day, my role in the team managing the game jam was to develop judging criteria to be utilised by the judges to select a winner. Our team worked over the course of a month, completing a range of necessary tasks like planning how the day would pan out, developing artwork & advertisements, securing the necessary spaces and equipment, and ensuring adequate technical and artistic assistance was available for the participants. We would have weekly meetings in which a Kanban board would be progressively updated depending on our progress up until the day of the Jam.​
On the Day
The events on the day of the game jam panned out differently to what I had anticipated. Originally, as I had developed the judging criteria, I was going to be a judge among 3 of my peers. However, it quickly became apparent on the day of the jam that many of the teams were made up of primarily artists, with little to no programming experience. To combat this myself and my peers Kris and Rhys were drafted into these different teams to provide technical support as we're all proficient in the use of the Unreal Engine. From here we essentially carried on as participants of the game jam, each working with teams of BA Game Art students to create games in line with the space theme revealed to us on the events start. Upon completion of the game and judging our team was revealed to have come second overall out of the 5 teams who had participated. I was happy with the result and grateful to have worked with a team of friendly, passionate, and talented artists that contributed to making our game look stylish and unique.
Final Thoughts and Feelings
To finish off this section I would like to summarise and reflect on my thoughts and feelings on how the game jam went so I can apply lessons learned from it in the future.
I felt the planning went incredibly smoothly, as far as I know everybody performed their allocated roles and I cannot really think of an issue we had prior to the day. My only regret is not being more proactive and involved with the event prior to its undertaking. Whilst I did produce the judging criteria and sheet that I was told was helpful some judges I spoke to, I cannot help but feel like I could have done more to provide input and assistance for the team as games are my area of expertise. Ultimately though the planning and later running went smoothly thanks in no small part to our cohesion and understanding as a team.
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If I am to be honest and a bit selfish, I am actually happy the days events did not pan out how they were expected. Actually being assigned to a random team, instead of just judging, provided me with the incredibly rewarding chance to work with a great group of skilled and passionate artists on a shared vision of a game for 9-hours. Our working together further demonstrated to me the importance of forward planning, task delegation, leadership roles, and communication as the event tested all of these areas intensely, and highlighted clear opportunities for personal improvement. A clear example of this to me was mine and a another teammates desire to implement certain post-processing visual effects neither of us were competent in the use of. We must have spent upwards of 1-2 hours trying to get this to work, in opposition to the requests of our other teammates, and upon finally implementing it successfully we realised it was completely unfit for purpose anyway. This to me highlighted the necessity of taking on board communication and criticism from teammates more readily and perfectly encapsulated the need for forward planning and testing.
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In the end though, I really enjoyed my time contributing to and taking part in the game jam. This for me was a first and I thoroughly enjoyed working with my group and looking at the feats of creativity displayed by those working around us. The game jam as previously mentioned has acted as a learning experience for me and provided me with lessons and examples I can apply through the remainder of my education and eventually my time in industry.