This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the Global Game Jam in Vancouver. If you are into game development, I highly recommend joining such an event when the chance arises.

I have attended a 48 hour game jam before but this was the first jam in which I worked with a team of people. I had decided that this time, I would focus on assisting rather than leading.
I ended up working with five other awesome people, using C# with XNA Game Studio. This was really outside of my knowledge base as I mainly know C# through however it relates to C++ and I have never touched XNA.

But being slightly uncomfortable with what your are doing is what makes this experience great. Learning new things in such a short and exciting time is so rewarding. At the same time, you get to meet so many people in the same situation as you, struggling to the last minute to complete something, fueled by limited sleep and caffeine injections.
Under this pressure, you get to meet people in such a different way. Certain formalities may be lost at 4am of the second night.

Something I enjoyed most of all was walking around to different groups and seeing if I could assist them debug any problems they were having, especially with groups using Game Maker. The excitement from other groups also made me excited to see their successes, especially when they had never made a game before!

My group and I struggled to get our game finished on time, getting about half of what we wanted done. But despite that, it was great fun. After programming alone for so long, it was a fantastic experience to work with others. Having now returned home, I am left slightly depressed to be once more alone with my code. Maybe I should get out more!

I don’t have a playable link to the game I worked on, so instead, here’s a link to a small game I made in 20 minutes while at the jam! I call it Fail Fall
Please, hold the applause :P

Also, I’d like to highlight one game I especially loved that came from the jam: Pyramid Defense
Be sure to check it out!