[IDEA] 1 Hour Game Jam

How bout we do something like that. Hell, maybe I’ll do it.

Goal: Make a game in one hour
Theme: Doesn’t matter
Judge: Hmm now thats the problem Maybe like a rubric would do something

So what do you guys think? Cool? Maybe if I can find a judge (Someone who couldn’t participate) then I could host this myself.

if you want to see cool games with textures you might need to have more then 1 h do like 6 h or 12

Ya your right, but that makes it almost like every other game jam.

One hour is far too little to be making games. You’d end up with a lot of low-quality (code-wise, and for most art-wise too) games.

expanding slightly: maybe make it more collaborative and make it so that all the games are put together in a “WarioWare” mini game style.

Perhaps max 60 seconds of game play?

I can see the titles already:

“Lines moving around and stuff”
“Legend of the white box”
“A blind man searches for a black cat in a dark room during a powercut”
“Press spacebar to begin (and end)”

well then 6-12 hours will work :stuck_out_tongue: Still anyone volunteer as judge?

in 1 hour? uhm… Maybe I could whip together an ultra-basic Slick2D game with a tiled map and some 8x8 textures, like a maze game with only one level? :smiley:

I suppose it’s possible, but I can’t imagine I’d have much in 60 minutes. :o

I think if you wanted to host something like this for a sort of “Microgame” challenge, I would give them 6~ hours. Gives people enough time to do more than the most simple basics, and with only 1 hour if you hit any problems along the way you’re toast. :frowning:

48 hours is already too little for a decent game for a lot of people :confused:

The point is that time spent developing rushes by, and 6-12 hours is the absolute minimum to have something worth judging. (See the 7 hour warmups for the 7DRL/7DFPS competitions)

Last LD it took me more than an hour just to come up with an idea. It took then another ~8-12 hours to get everything working well enough to start hacking together a storyline.

Now of course given the right tools, I could make a decent game in a day (using my custom engine which has undergone 5 or 6 iterations and can really only make one or two types of game). But it would hardly be worth the bandwidth taken to download it.

If you hang around on Reddit’s /r/gamedev I’m sure you’ll find some sort of gamejam to participate in.

If you aren’t allowed to use your own game engine you won’t create anything playable in 1 hour. If you are allowed to use your own engine the one hour rule isn’t that usefull :slight_smile:

Basically this sounds like a nice idea.
Games which must not be very fun or something, but runnable and very very simple.
Debugging could be a problem…

That would be interesting too, a game jam where debugging a single time would result in DQ.

Are you joking?

Lol pretty much, ud have to be pretty good to have a game tht actually worked at the end of that.

No, no, I didn’t mean it that way. You don’t seem to understand. :expressionless:

Depends on a genre of course but I usually spend a hour or so for a prototype. It’s playable but not very interesting.

Protojam would be a better name for one hour jam.

@JVallius: Supposed to be a joke, but not that bad…

1 hour hahah.
How about 48 hours, no IDE, only the java Native library?

I actually like this idea. It allows for good creativity.

How about we have a 1 hour game jam, but we all use the same boilerplate code, that way we can get on with making the game instead of wasting 15 minutes writing the base?

I am happily going to take up this challenge. I’ll post a link to the stream once I’m ready.

EDIT: No, I’m not being sarcastic.

  • Jev