MolyJam 2012

Holy shit, talk about an amazing experience!

 This past weekend was the Peter Molydeux (@petermolydeux) inspired Gamejam event which took place around the world. The goal of the event was to team up with people of all different backgrounds and to create a game in 48 hours, based on one of the game ideas @petermolydeux has come up with over the last few months.I'm sure that can sound difficult, especially for those of whom making a game is a bacon-wrapped mystery, but I can assure you the reality exceeds any and all expectations you may have had.

There were organized locations all over the world where this gamejam took place. The one I took part in was in Los Angeles at the Next-level Space office, sponsored by the game studio Magic Pixel Games (Shout out to Holden Link, @Holdenlink, for throwing together an amazing event all weekend long). The office was incredibly comfortable, a good thing considering a number of the jammers did not leave the entire 48 hours of the event.

Getting together with my team and working on our title was an amazing learning experience that I will expand on in another post dedicated to the game itself. I really just want to touch on some of the things that occurred to me at this gathering. For starters, walking around and seeing the sheer amount of creativity and dedication is awe-inspiring. To be fair, the ideas presented on @petermolydeux twitter aren't necessarily immediate game ideas, in the traditional sense. And at its core, that is what this event was all about. We can use the term "thinking outside the box", but what surprised me was the realization that there is a 'box' in this industry to begin with.

I remember the aspects of game development that fascinated me and made me want to become a developer myself, and one of those was the concept that anything could be made into a game given the right people and execution. Hearing people discuss the design of their games, both at the event and all over the web, one of the things I noticed is that everyone started their design discussions by trying to create the game using pre-established design methodologies that fit closest to what they perceived the idea to be. Seeing many of these finished products however, we see that so many teams were able to go ahead and break that box, and deliver compelling and interesting game ideas over a 48 hour period.

It's fitting that the symbol for the event was a cartoon Peter Molyneux kissing a green box/cube. I know that the image comes from the tweet that Molyneux said which would go on to inspire Molydeux to create his feux twitter account. However, when I see the logo and that box, I see an event where we are taking the box and kissing it goodbye, if not forever at least for the next 48 hours.