Introduction

“Global Game Jam 2019” (#GGJ19) Event  hosted by Madurai Game Developers Community With Pandian Saraswathi Yadav Engineering College – Incubation Cell. Global Game Jam, a game making hackathon, brought city’s tech geeks under one umbrella to develop any game based on a given theme.

GGJ?

Innovation - Experimentation - Collaboration

The Global Game Jam® (GGJ) is the world's largest game jam event (game creation) taking place around the world at physical locations. Think of it as a Hackathon focused on game development.

The GGJ stimulates collaboration and is not a competition.

The theme for this year’s jamming session was "What Home means to you" and the participants were required to develop a minimum playable game sequence at the end of the 48 hours event. “Gaming is an unexplored business sector. Though we have many competent professionals, not many venture into game development. Most popular games in the field are not by Indians. I wanted to sensitize our city game development friends and students through such events,” says K. Senthil Kumar, Organizer for the event and Founder of First Seed ,a Game Studio who conducts this events 4th Year consecutively starts from 4,20,110->130.  Over 120 people took part in the Fourth edition of the GGJ2019 in PSYEC Incubation Center. Participants of the Game Jam worked in small teams with size of two to five. Modeled on hackathon, it was more of exploration and experimentation for the participants who brainstormed to develop an idea into a game.

The event encourages people from different backgrounds like programmers, gamers, artists, script writers and storytellers to participate as the process of developing the game involves design, narration and artistic expression. “Programmers and coders alone do not make a game, you need a good story and a screenplay to carry forward the game through different levels,” says Senthil.

“It is an interactive & interesting entertainment where you can alter the course of the game by changing the dynamics. There are several game development tools like Unity and Unreal,mixer which are introduced to participants,” says Lakshmi Another Game Developer during this event.

Though it was not a competition, the Team DevDen gave away cash awards of Rs.5,000 & Rs.3,000 to couple of teams impressed the audience and players very much. Around 15-17 prototype games were demonstrated at the end of the event. Impressed by the enthusiasm shown by the participants, Madurai Startups, a Madurai based tech startup community focused on IT-based community activities, has offered internship for interested participants in Android, Animation and Digital Marketing Platforms. Also city based community co-work space JAYAVILLA

is announced to continue this gaming spirit by offering to use their space for next 25- 30 weekends to collaboratively work together to fulfill their game dreams.

Around 20 Industrial Experts and 100 students and Faculty members from various Arts/Engineering Colleges also participated in the event. Mr.Sidharth  from Tricksy Triad Interactive has given a great inputs for participants . Mr.Lakshmi from SystimaNX, proposed vote of thanks.