This weekend the Robocat Team attended our 3rd annual Nordic Game Jam. Teamed up by @AdagioKlez and @lorup we had 48 hours to create a game, submit it and present it to 400 other gamers.
Coming up with a novel idea and then piecing together art, architecture, development and game testing in 2 days is a monumental task. Working together as a team and actually ending up with a product that’s not only playable but fun is staggeringly difficult. It will leave you triumphantly caffeine-infused if you succeed or a broken down hunk of meat if you fail. Game Jams are essentially software development on speed. It trains everybody involved to chase down ideas, push their skills to the limit and work with impossible deadlines. It’s refreshingly focused, it’s all about cutting through clutter and making the most out of your time and resources. You get to really whiteboard and hack your way through what’s important and what makes a thing work. It’s rapid prototyping, team-building and gut-feel-training-camp all wrapped up in one insomniac package.
Other than possibly candidating as one of the most unhealthy weekends of your life it makes for a very intense learning experience, all of which can be directly applied to working in a start-up. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve never attended a Game Jam, you should seriously consider it, even if you’re not a programmer or a designer. It’s one of the best (and cheapest) educations you can get, and it’s fun too!
Oh and yes, that is a tiny pixel Hitler there on the right. Forgive our nordic sense of humor, but this year we made a multiplayer tank game for iOS and Laptop called Mein Panzer with some quirky balancing twists. We surprisingly made it among the 10 finalists and had a blast demoing it on the big stage.
Check out the video we made for the game, or catch the entire presentation shot by one of the audience (@electronicmilk).
We didn’t win anything but when we left the afterparty, people where still playing Mein Panzer on the big screen.
Disclaimer: We have no plans to release any of our Game Jam Games, and we generally try not to have any commercial interest when we do these things as it tends to work quite restrictive to the concept and execution.
See you again next year Nordic Game Jam!
