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Global Game Jam Hits Belfast

January 24th, 2013 by Irwin Fletcher Comments

 

Creating a new video game usually would take months, even years. It is a complex task and as such is expected to take as many hours.

 

 

Well Global Game Jam is trying to smash those times into oblivion.
The event which is international plays host to many different game designers, graphic designers, coders both professional and amateur and puts them in small teams. They are given one central idea and are to come up with a game in less than 48 hours.
It isn’t only limited to consoles either, mobile phones, board games and card games have all been made previously.

This year the event will be held in Belfast for the first time from the 25th – 27th January.
The event is being hosted by Farset Labs in Belfast which is a facility in the Weavers Court Business Park near Sandy Row.

Co-Founder Andrew Bolster spoke said to the BBC news team,

The aim was to create “a focal point of technological experimentation” and to foster “a better technological community for Northern Ireland”.

 

Taken from the Farset Labs site it says:

As part of the Jam, participants (or ‘Jammers’) will have access to a range of materials provided by corporate sponsors. The details are on the GGJ page, but there are a few that deserve highlighting:

  • $100 credit on the Joyent high performance cloud, a perfect place to host your online games,
  • Corona Labs are giving away 3 months of it’s full Indie SDK, perfect for building and hosting mobile games and social applications,
  • Mixamo, the film-grade character animation suite with simple import and export to a range of applications including Blendr and Unity, are opening up loads of toolkits for Jammers,
  • YoYo Games are also giving away licenses to their GameMaker:Studio software for developing cross-platform mobile games, and finally
  • GitHub, the heart and soul of so many developers, are giving $70 credit to each location, and we’ll be putting it up as a ‘Peoples Choice’ prize on Sunday Evening

This is exciting not only for Mr Bolster and everyone attending but also for Belfast. There are such hidden talents in the U.K. but get overshadowed by our American cousins.
It would be nice to see some great gaming ideas to come out of Belfast this weekend.

Events like these must remind big gaming companies that sometimes the brightest people in the business are yet to be found.

 

If you fancy attending the Global Game Jam they will accept applications up until 9am (GMT) on the day of the event. Click here to enter.

I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.