Judging the Houghton Game Jam

The third annual Houghton Game Jam at Michigan Technological University should be well underway now with people busily trying to create a game within a 24 hour window based on a particular theme, with no prior time to actually prepare design ideas. The theme for this year is ‘Time’, which will likely result in some interesting results. I wish the 20 developers, many of whom are working in teams of 2, the best of luck as they work hard to get their ideas hashed out.

I will be acting as one of the judges for this year’s event, along with The ZMan, Loren Roosendall, and Chris Rhinehart form HumanHead. This should be pretty fun – I mean, after all it pretty much means I have an excuse to play a bunch of games, right? I helped out with the very first Houghton Game Jam while I was still attending Michigan Technological University, where I was attempting to Live Blog the whole thing – although, that was met with some problems given that the room it was hosted in lost Internet only a few hours in. Actually, this blog was created around the time the original Gam Jam was being hosted, even.

Game Jams themselves are pretty neat events. The Global Game Jam that was hosted a number of weeks again went a long way to showing what a few developers can do in a short amount of time. They’re fun events where you can get together with other people and just hash out some games. It also means, if you aren’t in the Industry yet, you might even get something you can show off afterward.