Amy from MM on XX Game Jam

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Amy from Media Molecule has written a great blog post all about the XX Game Jam, which is well worth a read:

Android Grim Reaper game concept from XX Game Jam

We made a game called Android Grim Reaper – you play the Grim Reaper and have to find and harvest souls as their timer runs out. About 30 minutes before the end of the jam we didn’t have a game that ran, but with a lot of head scratching, and plenty of ingenuity, we pulled together and got a build limping towards functionality. Of course we were over ambitious, tried to do far too much in the 24 hours available, but that’s half the fun and makes for a tense and exciting finish! We’ll be polishing the game and hopefully in a week or so it’ll still be fun, but will also be vaguely understandable to players other than the dev team :)

It was an awesome day, so inspiring and a lot of fun! I’m pregnant which makes you pretty tired at the drop of a hat, so it has taken a week or so to recover from the late nights, but it was SO worth it.  I’ll definitely be GameJamming again soon!

Game Jams are a great way to get experience in making games, and taking part in them is one of our tips for getting into the industry.

If you want to know how to get a job in the games industry, check out our blog post ‘How to get a job in video games’ for tips and info on how our team members all ended up in games.

All About the XX Game Jam

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We produced the first ever all-women game jam!  The XX Game Jam in was in London on the 26th and 27th October 2012. It was kindly been hosted by Mind Candy (the creators of Moshi Monsters) and has been supported by a number of organisations and people - UWE's Digital Cultures Research Centre, UKIE, Ada Lovelace Day, Connection Point Technology, PlayMob, London Games Festival as well as us at Auroch Digital.  The event has had some great coverage, including: Gaming Thinktank, GamesIndustry.biz, RantGaming & the BBC (also on video)

"Within eight days of the registration going live we had filled 40 spaces," said Debbie Rawlings, "We have a waiting list of about another 40 already so we could run another next week and I'm totally confident that would sell out too." ... The theme for games created at the XX Game Jam was clockwork, a nod to Ada Lovelace, the female mathematician credited with writing the world's first computer programs in the 1800s.

She worked with Charles Babbage, an inventor whose "difference engine", a complex calculation machine which he designed but never built, is now considered to be the earliest computer.

Debbie from Auroch was the prinicapl producer of the event while Tomas joined a great group of judges for the event: Jo Twist from UKIE, Suw Charman-Anderson from Ada Lovelace Day and Martha Henderson from Wellcome Trust.

Game Jams are a great way to get experience in making games, and taking part in them is one of our tips for getting into the industry.

If you want to know how to get a job in the games industry, check out our blog post ‘How to get a job in video games’ for tips and info on how our team members all ended up in games.