Score Game Jam. Photo by Tuuli Saarinen

Story by Janne Jaakkola
Game Development Club Score decided to end the summer season with Score Game Jam 2010 event. This game development marathon, held in Demola, had 13 eager jammers and a handful of organizers. The point of the event was to brainstorm, team up and create a game in just 42 hours! In addition to the time constraint, all the games had implement the common theme. This time the theme was "Everything is different", which gave a very free reign to the designers.


The Friday night started with the revealing of the theme and team formation. Of the 13 jammers, four teams of three were made. The single audio designer was left out of the teams, as he promised to help all of the teams equally. The teams had a fresh mix of new and old students of TTVO as well as the members of the game development club Load, who had come all the way from Turku for this event. The Friday continued with ideation and project starting, which continue late in the night. The most hardy didn't go to sleep until five, but the first were up at 8AM to continue the work.

As Saturday was starting to change into Sunday, the games began to be playable, though some were still unfinished and one team had even changed their whole game idea. Nevertheless, motivation stayed high even though tiredness started to show through. After a couple of hours' of sleep the teams had to polish and prepare their games for presentation before the final presentation. As the clock struck 12PM on Sunday, Demola saw the presentation of five completely unique and different games.

Five completely different Games

From "How Was Your Day"

Each of the teams had interpreted the theme differently and thus created a completely different games. "How Was Your Day?" dealt through a series of minigames how, for some, a day filled with routines can still be completely different. The experimental puzzle-platformer "Cubo" put the player on the surface of a large cube, the maze of which could only be solves by understanding that the sides of the cube were different depending on the orientation of the cube. The half-finished "Coma" the player tried to steer a person in coma toward their memories, which they could detect in the complete darkness only by the sound. The other game of the same team focused on collecting apples. "Karma" challenged normal platformers by forcing the player to think when they should die, so that you could be reborn and advance towards enlightenment.

Examining the games and the atmosphere at the jamming site it is easy to say that the first Score Game Jam was a success. We were a couple of people short of the expected number of attendees, but that didn't affect the event - at least, not negatively. The point of the event was also to rehearse for the upcoming Global Game Jam, which we will hope to be the biggest game jam ever! Now it is easy for Score to move on to the autumn season and towards new adventures!

Score
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