I don’t know if any of you guys have heard of this, but it’s an actual on-site game competition.
It takes place in around 50 different places around the world. I’ll be at the San Francisco one next weekend. Anyone else planning on going to this? I believe you can still register. I’m doing it mostly for the potential networking - I doubt I’ll be able to win where there are like 1,500 contestants around the world. 
I never heard of it.
I followed the link, and it looks like it’s already over for this year…
Oops. It’s over at some locations, but not others. For instance, it’s over in Pittsburgh, so I couldn’t go if I wanted to.
Um, it’s not over anywhere. It all starts this coming Friday, the only differences being to adjust for time zones.
It’s being organized by the IGDA.
It’s not in actually San Fransisco it’s in Sunnyvale (incidentally about 10mins drive from where I live). I think I’ll check this out, I don’t have anything planned this weekend so may as well write games. Looks like there was a mandatory orientation day today (did you go Demonpants?) but I might see if I can still register.
Nevermind both my posts. The times I was looking at were the “Last Update” times, which means nothing. I looked at the site really fast and missed the entire point.
Yeah I went there today, it was sort of typical, didn’t really learn anything. If you’ve done any sort of timed programming competition, it’ll be standard fare for you.
But, none of the students from Cogswell College (where the jam takes place) showed up because they were at a funeral for a friend who died recently. So, I’m sure if you signed up ASAP and sent the organizer an email he’d still be able to add you in.
I emailed the organizer and he said it shouldn’t be a problem but he is going to get back to me. So in all likelihood I’ll see you there. I haven’t entered any contests before, this years 4K competition was my first ever so should be interesting.
Awesome, man, it’ll be cool to meet someone from JGO in person. Maybe we can make a Java group.
Yeah should be pretty fun. I suspect teams will mostly be using C# but I don’t even have windows so I think there will have to be at least 1 Java group.
Well from what I saw and heard from people C# seems unlikely because it’s so closely coupled with XNA which is a pain for IGDA to use. I imagine there will be a lot of C and C++, and maybe some Flash. Java seems a strong possibility because so many people know it.
Just like to say this was very fun, would strongly encourage people to take part next year. Was really interesting meeting a whole bunch of seriously talented people. It was a bit of a struggle as I had to learn from scratch the technology my team used (I think Demonpants had similar experience) which required installing Windows on my PC (need to perform an exorcism tonight). We ended up with something quite visually impressive (had some really good artists on my team) but was pretty damn boring.
If anybody is interested the theme was:
“As long as we have each other, we will never run out of problems”
You also had to include one of the adjectives “evolved, rotated, thin” (I think these differed by timezone) and each play had to be less than 5 minutes.
Our game was “Whisper” but frankly it’s not worth the 70meg download.
Yeah, I agree, it was a lot of fun and very cool meeting people, especially Shannon, the first person from JGO I’ve met in person. 
The technology thing was a big problem for me too. I spent the entire first day wasting time trying to get a pirated copy of Windows onto my Macintosh, with no resources around or blank CDs or anything, all because my group wanted to use XNA (which, after using it, is highly overrated in my opinion). This meant that I was probably only able to spend a solid 8 hours or so programming, which is really not much.
Next year I’m sure things will be much more streamlined, and having experienced things once I’ll know this time what I view as important in my group members. First and foremost is the technology, I think. Had this been in Java or Unity (ironically enough, 3 separate groups used Unity, but it just so happened I didn’t end up in one of them), I could have produced 5x or 10x the output. Then again, it’s sort of good being forced to learn new technologies, because so often I tend to avoid doing that.
My own ego sort of detracted from this experience for me, unfortunately. I was working with two neophyte programmers who nonetheless got more done than me, because they were both very familiar with XNA. So I sulked and felt bad about my own ability - I like to be one of the best. These sorts of experiences can very bluntly show you your own dark side, which can help in getting rid of stupid habits. Hopefully next year I’ll be less of a dick.
Anyway, despite me bitching (again) on this forum, I highly recommend GGJ. Just like Shannon, however, my game is totally not worth downloading, so I won’t share it here. We pulled off everything we wanted to but it turns out to be a nightmare to control. Oh well. We had a cool idea and we tried it out, and that’s worth plenty on its own, regardless of the result.