Saturday 26 January 2013

Montreal Game Jam 2013: Day 1

Just checking in before I get some shuteye. Today was the opening session of the Montreal Game Jam, part of the 2013 Global Game Jam.

Against all odds we managed to form a small team… unfortunately mainly comprised of people from Ubisoft. Not that this is a bad thing, but I was hoping for a little more random collaboration and chances to meet some new like-minded people. Not for lack of trying, I just found that most people were already in pre-formed groups or had a specific idea they wanted to develop, so were therefore unwilling to work with other designers. A disappointing start, but also a sign of how serious students and people outside of the industry are taking these events. With sponsorship of this particular jam being provided by Warner Brothers Montreal, it’s likely that this is seen as a foot in the door for budding developers – not that I blame people, but with other participants being relatively anonymous, they don’t know who they are “blowing off”.

Anyway, our little band of merry men consists of the following…

  • Aidan Green (Design)
  • Anshul Goyal (Programming)
  • David Baron (Design)
  • Jean-Sebastien Caron (Art)
  • …and myself, Sean Noonan (Design)

On the design side we’re collating our brainstorm session to support and create a prototype whilst our artist creates concepts so that we can hit the ground running tomorrow.

We rolled a d20 to decide on who has the deciding vote on any conflicts, which resulted in our artist, Jean-Sebastien taking the role as Creative Director.

More tomorrow, for now I sleep…