Does anyone remember the 1 Hour Game Jam? Recently I’ve been thinking about it and I kinda want to start it up again, but whats the point of a game jam If no one else wants to compete right? So I created a straw poll! Voting ends in 5 hours! Timer starts now:
If you haven’t ever heard of the 1HGJ, It’s a game jam where pretty much your only goal is to finish a game in 1 hour! The rules will be explained more if the jam is voted back into existence. Happy voting guys!
Doesn’t the world have enough game jams? They’re great to get people interested and as a once-in-a-while thing, but I feel like a lot of people focus too much on throwaway games and not enough on “real” projects.
Very well said my friend. But it is a great learning experience.
We have Ludum Dare and we literally just started a little game jam yesterday. What more do you want? *goes on knees and cries
There isn’t a lot you can really learn in one hour of hacking stuff up.
At that point you’re just programming old concepts from memory.
Well I’ll give you that, but you competed once. Don’t act like it wasn’t fun. You are right about learning to an extent, but It does teach you a lot of time saving techniques.
EDIT: Currently (YES) is winning.
I can agree that game jams can be a great learning experience. I’m a big supporter of Ludum Dare and One Game a Month.
But in the last couple years, game jams have become so popular- look at itch.io or Compohub or any of the other game jam organizers.
And that’s great- if people want to do them, awesome.
But on the other hand, I’ve also seen people get stuck just constantly doing little throwaway projects instead of ever completing something bigger.
And, again, whatever floats your boat is cool- I’d just like to see people graduate from game jams and onto bigger and better things. I agree that they can be great learning experiences- but the whole point of learning experiences is to grow and move on to the next level.
I don’t think this should come back. The problem I had with the 1 hour game jam is the unexciting nature of it.
LD works because it is hyped up for months, leading up to a night of intense coding with tons of spectators. Here, it is hyped for about a week (if at all), and only happens for an hour, which is not near enough time to make some serious and creative games.
All that I can really see come of it is either a ton of minuscule games, or a ton of unfinished games.
It was fun for the first time, probably only due to novelty. After it I had no intention of doing it again. Too much rush, not enough importance.
-wes
Also don’t forget that the Global Game Jam starts in exactly a month. You can get your game jam fix from that.
Votes are tied. 5 votes yes, 5 votes no!
While the idea of a 1 hour game jam sounds fun, I really think it’s kinda pointless. It just motivates people to memorize a set code pattern and crank it out as fast as humanly possible.
I don’t think I could even program anything functional in an hour from scratch, even my silly settings menu I’m working on right now has taken 3 days. I couldn’t imagine making anything that wasn’t a poorly coded pong/breakout clone in only one hour. Even less if I’m not allowed to use existing code I can copy/paste in. It’s just not realistic.
If you wanted to go for a ultra-short game jam, I’d suggest an absolute bare minimum of 16~ hours. That’s enough to make a half-ass’ed Atari quality game of some kind, and still have enough time to make it a little different than a generic copy-paste clone. Of course, if you allowed people to use existing code from other projects, or libraries, it would go a lot faster. But then you just favor the entire jam leaning to whoever has the most code pre-written they can plug-and-play.
Ludam Dare is about right, 48 or 72 hours (depending on if it’s the Jam or Compo) is just enough time for people to really hammer out an entire game, with unique concepts if they work their butt off. But 1 hour? We’d all just be making poorly written pong.