Ok, so this was a bit of a different experience for me. I have stayed up all night plenty of times, in some interesting places, but not someplace that was quite so lively as the Bay Area Game Jam at the Microsoft SVC campus this last weekend.
Roughly 70 game developers formed 14 teams leveraging the Wild Pockets gaming platform to build games in 24 hours and compete for a variety of awards provided by Wild Pockets. Wild Pockets is BizSpark One company, and a DogPatch Labs company, led by CEO Shanna Tellerman, that we discovered at DEMO a few years ago. The Wild Pockets team had arranged for a variety of high profile judges including Noah Falstein, John Elliot, Simon Amarasingham, Tim Keenan, Mike Saperstein, Ann Burkett, Joe Dunn, Brian Green, Kevin Bjorke, and Christian Novembrino.
Some teams came ready to compete, with sound authoring systems, high end gaming PC's, art etching pads, etc. One team, of two students from USC, finished finals week on Friday, came directly to Game Jam, and camped out for another 36 hours creating a pirate ship game.
Pirate Shippers did not win, but the detail of the ship, and ocean, by Eshan Mathur and Michael Sheenan, done in 24 hours after they finished finals was impressive. If you are looking for some game development talent, look at these guys.
I did a few presentations on developing games for Windows 7 and for the Windows Phone 7, leveraging content from MIX 10. If you are interested in doing native .NET game development, take a look at the mix content. That said, the Wild Pockets gaming platform is impressive, mostly due to the social collaboration features that allow independent game developers to share pre-built content to accelerate game development. For example, the ocean here, was leveraged from another game. This allows developers to focus on the creative game scenarios as opposed to texture and 3D surface coding.
For the second consecutive Bay Area Game Jam event, the Poindexters, consisting of Bradley Johnson, Daniel Bryner, and Chris Webb, won the event. They actually built two games and the games were declared a tie by the judges. It does not matter much, the winning team was clear. My favorite of the two Poindexter games was Eternal Velocity. You can click on the picture here to play the game – remember, 24 hours from a blank sheet to this game on Wild Pockets.
Once the game development was completed, we were entertained by a couple of rock bands, Corner Circle Jab and The One Ups, that played game jingles and riffed quite a bit. Here are some more photos from the event:
More… RedBull… Please
The winning team, the Poindexters, getting it done:
Christian Novembrino, Windows Live Games portfolio manager at Microsoft, judging the games:
Here is the full flickr feed.
You can see some of the other coverage in Social Times.
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