We made Lyre Inspyre at the Finnish Game Jam

The first ever Finnish Game Jam (FGJ) was held last weekend. FGJ was a part of the Global Game Jam event taking place in 39 countries around the world at the same time. Game developers jammed for 48 hours and made games around the theme: Deception. Besides the theme Finnish participants were also asked to utilize at least one of the following constraints: lyre, fire or wire in the games.

Global Game Jam countdown •

• 4,338 gamers registered globally for this year’s event
• 1,600 participants in the first year (2008)
• 928 games created over the past weekend
• 370 games produced the first year (2008)
• 39 countries, from Argentina to Wales, took part this year
  

All together nearly 90 persons attended to the FGJ in three locations (or actually four as also Turku AMK was also participating unofficially).

The jury's choice was: Play Dead 2: Growling of the Dead which is a zombie murmur game (aka zombie singstar). The jammers' voted Grow Up! to be the best game of the Finnish Game Jam 2010. ...Yes -- bummer! It wasn't ours :) I was with a team who did Lyre Inspyre. We tried to do something we don't do at work (majority of or team does games for living) and/or to experiment with weird game play but at the end our solution was rather conventional one. The good thing is that we manage to pull it off, worked well as a team and got the game done by Sunday afternoon! I am also very happy that we managed to combine casual look and feel with hard core game play :D

All in all Global Game Jam is a brilliant concept and even if the teams were very concentrated on their projects for the most of the time, we also had fun. It was nice to see the variety of projects and interpretations of the theme.