[An offhand tweet from a Double Fine programmer snowballed into one of the largest global game jams ever. Jam co-organizer and Game Developer EIC Brandon Sheffield looks at how it all went down.]
Well, it happened. What began as an offhand tweet from Double Fine gameplay programmer Anna Kipnis has snowballed into one of the largest global game jams, and I can safely say it was a resounding success.
Not three weeks ago, Kipnis wondered publicly on Twitter why there hadn't been a game jam based on the tweets of Peter Molyneux (Fable, Populous, Black & White) parody account @petermolydeux. This came after Molyneux himself responded to one of Molydeux's tweets, causing a bit of an internet meta-explosion. The singularity was upon us!
But Kipnis took it a step further - if Molyneux can take this seriously, why shouldn't the rest of the world? Responding to Kipnis' original tweet were Patrick Klepek, Chris Remoand I. We four became the defacto organizers of this movement, which we imagined would happen in the Bay area, with a few close game developer friends.
I made a Google document to sign up potential developers, and we tweeted it out. Within an hour, we had over 70 responses, and realized at least 20 of those were from the U.K., and several were in the U.S., but outside the Bay area.
We realized quickly that a single spreadsheet couldn't contain this jam - it was bigger than us. We moved to an "organizers thread" on Facebook, and the rest is history. Over 900 developers signed up to take part in jams in almost 35 cities across the world, from the original U.S. site in California's Bay Area, to the U.K., to Israel, to Mexico, to Finland, to Australia, and beyond. More developers jammed on their own in solidarity from their homes.
How the heck did this happen? Why was it so successful? What can we do better next time (as it seems certain there will be a next time)? To get at a chunk of it, I'll write an abridged postmortem of the event, followed by my thoughts about the jam I ran in Oakland; the first #Molyjam to get a location, and the last to present its demos.
What went right
1: Organized like a jam
Everything came together organically, just like in a game jam itself. A few people started out with no concrete idea of what the end result would be, and people stepped up when they needed to. Jake Rodkin of Telltale came up with great t-shirt designs, as well as the "What Would Molydeux" jam name. Zane Pickett stepped up and created our web site, and organized our game submission form. Justin Ignacio of Justin.tv came in to help with our livestreams. The list goes on. When something was needed, someone stepped up to help.
We also had a number of generous sponsors. Unity, Game Maker, Gamesalad, and Construct 2 offered temp licenses of their engines during the jam (coordinated by Kipnis, among others). Individual cities got sponsors for food, locations, and more. The event had to happen, no matter what - and people made it so.
One of the smarter things we did was set a date early on. Not only did April 1 fit with our Molydeux theme, it happened to fall on a Sunday, meaning we could have the entire weekend to make these games. From the start, we had a date to work toward, and it was a hard deadline. This helped us get everything ready, and I have to say, it went off surprisingly well considering the accelerated timeline.
Everyone's overwhelming goodwill was very much in keeping with the theme of the jam, and there was positivity throughout. Every organizer sacrificed their time and energy for the greater cause, and I think I can speak on behalf of everyone when I say it felt amazing to be involved in such a crackling ball of positive energy!
2: Molydeux/Molyneux
"Peter Molydeux" signed on to the project immediately, which lent the jam legitimacy. The jam was based on his tweets, so participants had an instant idea of what the theme was, and the ability to think about what they might like to do. Molydeux curated some of his best tweets for those who didn't want to sift through everything, and we also got a Google doc of every one of his original tweets.
We had a solid vision from start to finish, and this really helped get things set up. There was no confusion about goals, no back and forth about theme, and no dissent - the reason new cities joined up was because they had already bought in!
The day of the jam, Molydeux even made us an introductory video, with closing words from Molyneux himself. And amazingly, Molyneux showed up at the London jam, giving an opening speech, and participating in the first day.
Who could have predicted that this would come full circle? Molyneux showed up to a jam based on a Twitter account making fun of his grandiose ideas. Why would he do such a thing? Because he correctly recognized that while this was based on a joke account, the participants actually do care about emotion in games. They care about making silly projects that might make us think differently about games.
In essence, this game jam encapsulates everything Molyneux himself has actually tried to accomplish over the years. Perusing the livestreams, every event seemed in keeping with the spirit of whimsy and emotional game making.
3: Popularity
My goodness, we got a lot of press about this thing. People were astounded that it was happening at all, and our success in making it happen was a self-perpetuating hype machine. Almost every day the core team of organizers would get a new email from a new city somewhere in the world that wanted to join in.
We fielded dozens of press requests. Friends outside of the industry heard about it. The massive popularity of the jam showed what power individuals and indies have in this industry now. It truly feels as though we have the power to make the games we want. So many amazing games came out of this jam, that people would absolutely willingly pay for.
Molyjam was in the global spotlight, especially since almost every part of the world had a jam going, inspiring local press to get involved. This means our message of emotion (and silliness!) in games, was actually spreading throughout the world. We weren't toiling in isolation, patting each other on the back and only seeing our own games.
Over 250 games have been uploaded so far, with more to come. Our results are bare, here for all to play and see. It really feels like this jam could have a lasting impact. Teams and friendships were formed, and those who couldn't join could hear about the process, or play the results. That's success.
What went wrong
1: Organized like a jam
Not one of the original four organizers had ever organized a jam. None of us had even been to one (though Anna had participated in Double Fine's internal jams). So the fact that we were suddenly at the helm of an international event was a bit of a surprise. We did the best we could, but there was confusion at times. We fielded questions as best we could, but sometimes there simply were no answers.
That's when others stepped up to help, which was amazing - but we'll have a lot more experience doing this when we head into the next jam, and a lot more of the systems and processes should be in place.
Also, we all had our own jobs to do, on top of organizing this event. Anna Kipnis in particular put in long hours, and at one point became ill. As the event exploded, I was driving to Phoenix, and could only communicate via smartphone. Since we couldn't anticipate the event's popularity, we couldn't plan for it, and had to scramble to put things together. San Francisco didn't have a venue until three days before the event, for instance. Next time around we'll have it planned for scale from the start. We learned a lot through this process.
2: Fragmented information
We started out asking folks on Twitter. We graduated to a Google doc, but that grew unwieldy. We moved the event to Facebook, which worked for the most part, but not everyone has a Facebook account, so we also had an Eventbright signup.
In San Francisco, since they needed names in advance for security, Eventbright became the only signup that mattered. Also due to the crazy size of the event, San Francisco and East Bay had to split up. Oakland was originally the home of the whole jam, as we had gotten The MADE to agree to host us, but they can only reasonably hold 50 people.
Once signups ballooned to 225, San Francisco had to get its own event - but since this happened late in the game, it was hard to let everyone know about the shift, and many folks from the East Bay went to San Francisco, and many folks from San Francisco had to come to the East Bay due to the Eventbright scenario.
Again, in the future we'll be able to streamline this process, and get our venues set up far in advance. Under three weeks it was a pretty tough sell to begin with, but we also needed projectors, good internet, public transportation access, and late-night access. That we got venues at all is amazing.
3: Upload system
This one we're still working on. We haven't quite solved the problem of how to get so many games out to the public. As I mentioned before, hundreds of games are already available, but some were simply too large for our uploader, and the thing broke very early on in the process.
On top of that, it was getting flooded with requests, since people wanted to play the games. Popularity is a great problem to have, but it killed our web volunteers. As we figure out how to package up all the larger games, we'll be tweeting out how folks can find them, but it's unfortunate that not all games could be uploaded at the same time, to ride the wave of popularity. Again, this is something to fix for next time.
A word from San Francisco
San Francisco had the largest Molyjam jam in the world, with around 150 developers participating. So many games came out of the jam that the closing presentation lasted three hours. "We had a guy that came by and made a game during the presentation, that's how long the presentation was," Anna Kipnis told me.
The major success in San Francisco was the livestream. There were lots of antics, as Kipnis says, but the teams also did walkthroughs in the space, updating the stream about various developers' progress, and keeping the audience engaged, which is somewhat unusual for a jam. That caught on to other locations, which started doing similar things. "The internet was very supportive of the game developers as they were working," said Kipnis. "That I did not expect at all."
The team panned the camera a lot, and folks started to notice a guy with an orange hat. His name was Bill Kiley, and he was a musician - once the San Francisco jam showed some of his music, he became a mini-celebrity, with folks sharing his soundcloud in the chat. The team also interviewed some of the more famous folks in the crowd, and really created a sense of community.
The sunny side of the Bay
I was the organizer of the Oakland/East Bay jam, and I felt like we had a somewhat unique event. We had around 40 people across the whole weekend, though some folks filtered in and out. We managed to produce around 10 games, and everyone finished something, including one participant who made a fantastic game entirely on the last day, after showing up at 3 p.m.
What was really striking about the Oakland jam though, was the diversity. We had straight folks and gay folks. We had Black people, White people, Asian people, and Hispanic people. We had a very healthy distribution of men and women, including transgendered folks. The ages ranged from under 20 to over 40.
It may sound odd to point all this out so specifically, but I'll remind you that this was all happening within a group of 40. The diversity of the crowd was astounding to me, and if the Oakland jam were a microcosm of the industry, discussions of gender, race, and orientation in games discussions would be far fewer and further between.
What was it about this event that brought so many people together? Oakland is a very diverse place, which could explain some of it. But more than that, we all cared about making games, and we all cared about the content of these games. The ideas in these tweets were silly, but laden with good ideas and the potential for real emotional involvement.
And that appeals to people across all walks of life. To look at our jam, the problems of diversity in game development would appear to be solved. I can only hope to one day walk into any given game development studio and have it look like Oakland.
Thanks to every organizer and participant across the globe. This has been an amazing experience for all of us. We love you all, and I know we'll see you again.
Individual city organizers are welcome to add their local impressions in the comments below!
I was one of the Organizers of the Ottawa location, we had about a dozen people out, and we finished 4 games. Next time I would like to get our location organized a little sooner, so that we could ensure a 48 hour jam space, and probably get more people out.
It was still fantastic.
Big thanks to Arctic empire for hosting!
This is definitely my favourite jam. I look at the people participating, and the games they're creating, and I know that I'm not alone in thinking that we could be doing so much more.
The San Francisco event went great. I was particularly happy to see that there were two or three teams during the wrapup presentations made up entirely of people who had never made a game before. They still shipped playable games, and one of them, Secret Dad, was a clear highlight of the event. That was wonderful.
Most of the lessons from the San Francisco event were logistical in nature. I didn't know I had to book the cleaning staff an additional night, so we had a bit of trash overflow on the last day, and I had to buy trash bags and toilet paper. We didn't consider how we would show the games on the projector, so we had issues in the beginning, before everyone moved over to recent Apple laptops with the mini DisplayPort or a PC with VGA. We didn't turn the camera around during the original presentation, so anyone tuned into the live stream had to wait until a video went online hours later. We didn't know the projector resolution needed to be a certain hz value in order to stop the colors from looking terrible on the live stream, so some games looked warped when they looked fine in person. We should have just reached out to more sponsors to cover food and drinks, but none of us had ever dealt with contacting sponsors before, and we got lucky that someone just felt like covering food and drinks on the first night.
I consider these all minor problems, though, stuff we could not have predicted the first time doing this, and I appreciated everyone's patience as we sorted through the issues. Learning to be an MC for an event was a surreal experience, too.
The Adelaide game development scene is already small, and our regulars are even fewer in numbers, though we make up for it with pluck. We didn't really get much new blood, and our numbers dropped after the first day thanks to an unfortunately timed birthday (who celebrates birthdays when there are games to be made?!), but it brought us all closer together and made us feel more globally connected than any other jam.
We grew during the jam; not as developers -- though we certainly walked away a little wiser in that regard -- but as people. I saw people's in sore need of a confidence boost receive just that, people who gave up their own precious development time to help a friend in need, and most important of all, I realised that there's nothing quite like a nice cup of tea.
I'm glad to hear it went so well, despite attrition. Birthdays aren't so bad; the artist/designer behind one of Seattle's games had his house robbed on Friday night! Poor guy had to pull out and the game didn't make it.
It was a blast to be part of, and the folks running the Boston event were at the top of their game! It was well-organized and everyone had a wonderful time!
I was the organizer of the LA jam. What a crazy two weeks it has been. A lot went "right," more than I expected: we had an awesome venue in NextSpace LA which let us stay open the whole 48 hours, we had a ton of people show up (60+ jammers from 25+ different companies), a very supportive sponsor in Magic Pixel Games (gotta give the plug), and everything ran really smoothly. We had more than 15 teams produce everything from Unity games to flash games and hardware games with Arduino to physical card games.
Next year I'd like to put a bit more planning into getting the livestream audience involved. Involvement from attendees at the other sites and random spectators on the internet gave everyone at our site a ton of motivation. We crowdsourced sound effects, mechanic ideas, and even received fanart for both our games and silly memes that developed over the course of our 48 hours of delirium. We watched some of the jammers in Germany and the UK wrap up their games, and in turn, some of them set alarms to wake up and watch our final presentations over here. San Francisco and Oakland even waited for us to finish down here before starting their presentations to encourage everyone to check out what we were doing. The amount of respect the devs at each site had for the others is something I've never seen before at a game jam, but it ended up being one of the defining characteristics of it for everyone involved at our site.
Certainly there are more areas for improvement - I learned that it isn't reasonable to expect each attendee to consume one beverage every three hours, for instance, and had a ton of leftover drinks and snacks - but all in all I was blown away with how much went right either by dumb luck or the fantastic support of the LA game dev community.
Thanks to Holden for doing such an amazing job organizing the jam. We were really lucky to have such a great venue with 24 hour access and refreshments, and I loved how you handled the livestream. Seeing so many people across the globe racing towards the same goal was really cool, and helped push us even harder.
I had no idea what to expect out of my first game jam, but I came away very surprised. Not only did many clever ideas come out of the 48 hour pressure cooker, but I met many friendly, inspiring people as well. It was an extremely motivating experience, and I'm already polishing my skills in anticipation of the next event! Thanks again, Holden!
Holden did a FANTASTIC job with the jam. This was my first jam, and I didn't really know what to expect, but it all ran so smoothly.
I also want to second Holden's comments about the livestream. I think we in LA did a pretty good job interacting with them, and them with us - for me, that was the highlight. Knowing that there were dedicated stream viewers, who were as engaged in our projects as we were - that was something special indeed.
And of course, couldn't help but feel some local pride when one viewer commented halfway through the presentations that "LA is BRINGING it!"
I was at the LA jam with Holden and was on Kenan's team. The way Holden organized everything and the sponsors he was able to score made this an incredible experience for my first jam as well. The live stream was a ton of fun, especially since they stayed up with us through the night (Holden, myself, and a couple others didn't leave the site until the very end) and they even branded me "Sleeping Bag Guy". I definitely think having a more active and involved live stream would make future jams that much more enjoyable, as our experience was tons of fun and very productive. It was great to work with such creative people that could have fun while seriously working on a game that may or may not be any good. If anything, it proved to be a great way to test game mechanics and go through the production process from beginning to end with little to no overhead or risk.
Holden, your jam sounded like it went really well, even in progress - and having a clear/good camera was a really good thing as well! Thanks for all your hard work on this.
Hi Brandon, thanks for organizing that and for buying us all a cake.
Remember when I said that eating cake for dinner was a bad idea? I failed to mention that I had two slices. So please keep that in mind in case you're ever faced with a decision about whether cake is dinner. One slice may be sufficient, further research is required.
As someone who watched the entire San Francisco and Oakland presentation livestreams on Sunday night, I hope that there are better webcams next time! (Actually, SF's was pretty OK, it was the Oakland feed that was rough.) Anyway, overall the livestreams were very nice to have, and it was really great to be able to watch people work, and see the end results. I was happy to see several hundred people viewing the SF feed. In the end, I was really impressed with the results -- it's hard to believe that this went so well the first time around, especially with such a tight planning schedule.
The SF web cam we had was very nice, but limited by bandwidth (so the res had to be 640x360 to ensure it didn't hiccup) and not knowing the projector would screw up some of the presentations if we didn't set the resolutions correctly.
I really enjoyed the Oakland jam. I think organizing into teams with people we didn't know had a positive effect. It encouraged people to mix more. The jam in general had a nice feel- I would definitely go again.
There was something special about the Oakland Jam, (except for Molyneux, I was maybe the oldest MolyJammer) but I suspect many other participants felt deeply what was special about their gathering.
My favorite moment was when a couple people watching our team (Cardboard Graffiti) asked to use my engine to make a game. It enabled two more games for Oakland! Those jammers and I are planning to spiff up the engine and put it out there, open source. That's extra special sauce, to me.
Great stuff Keith. Unfortunately I didn't know your engine was being used by others when the guy who didn't know anything about making games came in on saturday... I would've directed him your way!
Thanks very much to all of the people that organized this event at the global level, and to Collin Moore (@shinyidol) for pulling together our local Seattle MolyJam. We had two dozen people turn out five games and dozens of friendships. We never got much going in terms of a livestream, but check out the awesome blog Collin maintained for us! http://molyjamseattle.wordpress.com/
Also, for Twitter users I have to suggest following UNBEARABLE's protagonist; a bear that hugs people to death, "@PeterMaulingyou". I'd avoid his punster alter-ego "@Maulingdeux" though.
Montreal Molyjam was a success! Sad for thoses who missed it. Thanks to Renaud Bedard, the benevoles and sponsors, definitivaly a must for the next years.
This was a fantastic weekend. I hosted in Dundee, Scotland and we made 6 mad mad games that never would have existed. Thanks to Brandon, Anna, Chris, Patrick and all other contributors for great organizing in such a short time!
Here's my, I hope, wonderfully baffling contribution: http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=254 Tongue firmly in cheek! :D
An amazing weekend for Game Design. Thanks to everybody who put in the effort to make it possible. The Montreal Jam had a good 30 or 40 people at it. Good stuff.
Here's what our team turned out: http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=103
The only thing I worry about for next year's jam is the source of concepts. How long did Molydeux tweet to total the first batch? It'd be great if the pile of concepts changed each year, but where would they come from?
Our one big challenge was attendance. With only 2 weeks notice, it would have been a big enough challenge to get things organized, but spreading the word was even harder. 48 hours is a huge commitment for many people, and it's not something a lot developers can spare with so little warning. Toronto's TOJam is known to attract hundreds of people, but a lot of them plan months in advance.
"What would Molydeux?" is a hard thing to communicate. While a refreshing amount of people got it immediately, others had a tough time understanding what I was asking them to spend a weekend on. Eventually, I started embedding sample tweets in broadcasts and e-mails, and that's when excitement started growing.
Another challenge I think most teams faced, was the organization of streaming. Getting things setup was not too much of an issue, but setting up a single place for viewers and venues to browse active streams was a bit challenging. Eventually an event page was setup on twitch.tv, but if we'd reached out to them earlier it would have meant better exposure. Streaming from venues like Brighton in the morning and watching demos from places like Dieburg and Boston really was a lot of fun.
Our demos were great, but If I were better prepared, I think they could have been even better. We didn't have a projector, but we had plenty of TVs. We decided to screencast the demos, which I think was the right call for the international viewers, but that meant they weren't able to see or hear the dev teams. With a bit more practice, we could have setup a screen split to show the dev teams without sacrificing the high quality game audio and visuals.
I had a tremendous amount of help from everyone in my office, and everyone attending had such a positive attitude. It was a great weekend.
Toronto Demo Highlights:
http://www.justin.tv/molyjamto/videos?kind=highlights
I organized the Las Vegas jam. With a small gamedev scene, and a couple of the already limited local studios neck deep in their own projects for the weekend, we were pleasantly surprised to see over 20 participants here in Las Vegas.
Logistics-wise, things went smoothly. Shuffle Master really stepped up as sponsor, offering studio space for the teams and food for the whole weekend. PopChips and Red Bull jumped onboard, donating snacks and drinks. Three teams were formed (including one large team of most strangers that gelled surprisingly well), participants came back every day, and all three teams completed fantastic projects. New friends were made, and everyone is looking forward to the next event we can all take part in together.
What could we do better next time?
Livestream. As the Vegas jam didn't have one large room to work in, we opted not to go with a webcam. Next year, we'll add one for sure. The other local streams were great inspiration, and especially good company during the late nights (a nod here to the 24hr LA stream, nice work Holden!), and I'd love to show off some of the Las Vegas dev talent.
More attendees. We couldn't do much about this one as Petroglyph and GarageGames, our largest local studios, were both in the midst of wrapping up important projects. With more participants from those studios, we could've easily hit 2-3 times the number of attendees. Hopefully the timing will work out better for them next year.
All in all, Molyjam was an amazing experience. Huge thank yous to Anna, Brandon, Patrick, and Chris, and to the rest of the volunteers who helped make this thing happen.
Tired, exhausted, and sick after the 48 hour jam...i would do it again in a heartbeat. Thanks to all the organizers and participants and to Molydeux for tilting us off-balance with the oddball tweets. Great things can come from changing your axis and challenging cliches.
It was still fantastic.
Big thanks to Arctic empire for hosting!
(my game was Reluctant Rambo)
I consider these all minor problems, though, stuff we could not have predicted the first time doing this, and I appreciated everyone's patience as we sorted through the issues. Learning to be an MC for an event was a surreal experience, too.
We grew during the jam; not as developers -- though we certainly walked away a little wiser in that regard -- but as people. I saw people's in sore need of a confidence boost receive just that, people who gave up their own precious development time to help a friend in need, and most important of all, I realised that there's nothing quite like a nice cup of tea.
Seriously, tea is just that damn good.
I was the organizer of the LA jam. What a crazy two weeks it has been. A lot went "right," more than I expected: we had an awesome venue in NextSpace LA which let us stay open the whole 48 hours, we had a ton of people show up (60+ jammers from 25+ different companies), a very supportive sponsor in Magic Pixel Games (gotta give the plug), and everything ran really smoothly. We had more than 15 teams produce everything from Unity games to flash games and hardware games with Arduino to physical card games.
Next year I'd like to put a bit more planning into getting the livestream audience involved. Involvement from attendees at the other sites and random spectators on the internet gave everyone at our site a ton of motivation. We crowdsourced sound effects, mechanic ideas, and even received fanart for both our games and silly memes that developed over the course of our 48 hours of delirium. We watched some of the jammers in Germany and the UK wrap up their games, and in turn, some of them set alarms to wake up and watch our final presentations over here. San Francisco and Oakland even waited for us to finish down here before starting their presentations to encourage everyone to check out what we were doing. The amount of respect the devs at each site had for the others is something I've never seen before at a game jam, but it ended up being one of the defining characteristics of it for everyone involved at our site.
Certainly there are more areas for improvement - I learned that it isn't reasonable to expect each attendee to consume one beverage every three hours, for instance, and had a ton of leftover drinks and snacks - but all in all I was blown away with how much went right either by dumb luck or the fantastic support of the LA game dev community.
I had no idea what to expect out of my first game jam, but I came away very surprised. Not only did many clever ideas come out of the 48 hour pressure cooker, but I met many friendly, inspiring people as well. It was an extremely motivating experience, and I'm already polishing my skills in anticipation of the next event! Thanks again, Holden!
I also want to second Holden's comments about the livestream. I think we in LA did a pretty good job interacting with them, and them with us - for me, that was the highlight. Knowing that there were dedicated stream viewers, who were as engaged in our projects as we were - that was something special indeed.
And of course, couldn't help but feel some local pride when one viewer commented halfway through the presentations that "LA is BRINGING it!"
You guys rocked it!
Remember when I said that eating cake for dinner was a bad idea? I failed to mention that I had two slices. So please keep that in mind in case you're ever faced with a decision about whether cake is dinner. One slice may be sufficient, further research is required.
My favorite moment was when a couple people watching our team (Cardboard Graffiti) asked to use my engine to make a game. It enabled two more games for Oakland! Those jammers and I are planning to spiff up the engine and put it out there, open source. That's extra special sauce, to me.
Also, for Twitter users I have to suggest following UNBEARABLE's protagonist; a bear that hugs people to death, "@PeterMaulingyou". I'd avoid his punster alter-ego "@Maulingdeux" though.
Here's my, I hope, wonderfully baffling contribution: http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=254 Tongue firmly in cheek! :D
Here's what our team turned out: http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=103
I was the organizer of the Toronto Jam.
Our one big challenge was attendance. With only 2 weeks notice, it would have been a big enough challenge to get things organized, but spreading the word was even harder. 48 hours is a huge commitment for many people, and it's not something a lot developers can spare with so little warning. Toronto's TOJam is known to attract hundreds of people, but a lot of them plan months in advance.
"What would Molydeux?" is a hard thing to communicate. While a refreshing amount of people got it immediately, others had a tough time understanding what I was asking them to spend a weekend on. Eventually, I started embedding sample tweets in broadcasts and e-mails, and that's when excitement started growing.
Another challenge I think most teams faced, was the organization of streaming. Getting things setup was not too much of an issue, but setting up a single place for viewers and venues to browse active streams was a bit challenging. Eventually an event page was setup on twitch.tv, but if we'd reached out to them earlier it would have meant better exposure. Streaming from venues like Brighton in the morning and watching demos from places like Dieburg and Boston really was a lot of fun.
Our demos were great, but If I were better prepared, I think they could have been even better. We didn't have a projector, but we had plenty of TVs. We decided to screencast the demos, which I think was the right call for the international viewers, but that meant they weren't able to see or hear the dev teams. With a bit more practice, we could have setup a screen split to show the dev teams without sacrificing the high quality game audio and visuals.
I had a tremendous amount of help from everyone in my office, and everyone attending had such a positive attitude. It was a great weekend.
Toronto Demo Highlights:
http://www.justin.tv/molyjamto/videos?kind=highlights
Logistics-wise, things went smoothly. Shuffle Master really stepped up as sponsor, offering studio space for the teams and food for the whole weekend. PopChips and Red Bull jumped onboard, donating snacks and drinks. Three teams were formed (including one large team of most strangers that gelled surprisingly well), participants came back every day, and all three teams completed fantastic projects. New friends were made, and everyone is looking forward to the next event we can all take part in together.
What could we do better next time?
Livestream. As the Vegas jam didn't have one large room to work in, we opted not to go with a webcam. Next year, we'll add one for sure. The other local streams were great inspiration, and especially good company during the late nights (a nod here to the 24hr LA stream, nice work Holden!), and I'd love to show off some of the Las Vegas dev talent.
More attendees. We couldn't do much about this one as Petroglyph and GarageGames, our largest local studios, were both in the midst of wrapping up important projects. With more participants from those studios, we could've easily hit 2-3 times the number of attendees. Hopefully the timing will work out better for them next year.
All in all, Molyjam was an amazing experience. Huge thank yous to Anna, Brandon, Patrick, and Chris, and to the rest of the volunteers who helped make this thing happen.
Bunny Bus-ter
http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=252
Hourglass
http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=265
When Doves Cry
http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=286