Programmer Mike Turano is a game jam fan.
The 32-year-old computer programmer and a partner created a puzzle-stacking game at a jam last year, but the two never imagined it would be something they’d want to market. A second-place finish convinced them otherwise.
They’re hoping to bring a mobile app of the game to market this year.
That’s just one of the draws of a game jam, where professional designers, coders, sound artists and gaming enthusiasts hole up in offices and conference rooms to compete and create video, mobile, card and board games over a limited period of time, usually a weekend.
Players don’t learn the themes (death, superheroes ) or constraints, such as use of particular color schemes, until they arrive at the venue. Some teams aren’t even formed until arriving at the jams, where a programmer might meet an artist, or an audio person might be called on to assist several teams.
“There’s a lot of team spirit,” said Sheri Rubin, founder and CEO of Design Direct Deliver, a website development firm in Mount Prospect and a secretary of the International Game Developers Association. ”And you’re thinking outside a company. It’s giving people a place to be creative without having to necessarily worry about the end result. They can work on a genre they’ve never worked before.”
There’s a physical game jam in Chicago once a month, she estimated. The typical game jam in Chicago draws about 50 participants, paying $20-$35 each.
Turano and partner Brandon Sharas plan to release a free app of their puzzle game in early 2014 for Android devices. The duo hopes doing so will help them establish name recognition, better enabling them to charge a nominal fee for a new PC game they developed during an October jam they’re calling “Grave Danger.”
“Most people who do programming are likely to toil away for years in a lot of cases at something,” Turano said. “You could focus on every tiny thing. It could always be better; and, before you know it, years go by.”
“The game jam doesn’t give you that option.”
Gold Coast resident Whitaker Trebella has had some success in game development — he says he’s earned about $20,000 from the $2.99 “Pivvot” strategy game for iPhones he released in late July. He recently began participating in game jams as a way to try out potential partnerships.
“It’s kind of a cool way to test the waters before you enter into anything serious,” said Trebella, a 27-year-old music teacher. “Before I ever work with someone officially, I plan on working with them in a game jam setting. You get to see how you work together and it’s like an example of what it would be like to work with them full time.”
The market is increasingly open to such independently published mobile games. Creators can upload games directly to Android or go through Apple’s App Store. Game-makers receive about 70 percent of the revenue from each download, according to the Apple website.
For years, game developers have gathered informally with friends and colleagues to create. But the concept of having an organized event at which teams meet in one location to develop games is fairly new, said Rubin, who heads the game developers association’s Chicago chapter, which hosted the October jam.
Part of indie development culture, the events often are organized by colleges, support councils and hobbyists. The spirit is generally collaborative, with participants often lending their skills to other teams.
The challenges, participants said, provide opportunities to develop new skills, and, for employees of companies who spend years at a time on a single game, a chance to flex creative muscles on something different.
Not all game jams take place in a single location. The Global Game Jam, for example, in January 2013 had teams at 309 sites in 63 countries. More than 3,000 games were created, organizers said.
Game quality at the events has improved due to better tools being introduced, said developer Rob Lach, a member of the Indie City Games collective, a self-described collection of Midwest-based video game nerds, which hosts four to five game jams a year. “More and more recently people develop prototypes at the jam and continue developing it further along.”
That’s the case with game developer The Men Who Wear Many Hats, which created a mobile game last year during Indie City’s monthlong Six Pack Jam. The free game, “Max Gentlemen,” is being enhanced, thanks to the $12,000 the group raised in a Kickstarter campaign that ended in November.
Developer Ryan Wiemeyer said the group plans to make money by offering in-game content, such as additional characters, for 99 cents. The game, in which players build stacks of hats on the heads of characters and avoid birds or projects that could topple them, also will be available this year on Microsoft Windows, Apple’s Macintosh and the Linux operating systems.
Wiemeyer, a lecturer at DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media, said he participates in at least one game jam a year.
“You always learn so much,” Wiemeyer, 28, said. “You usually learn through failure. But it gets out of the way pretty quickly.
“As far as game development is concerned, it is our version of a marathon. A runner pushes themselves to the limit until they collapse.”
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