Organizing a Game-Art Jam
In November of 2017 I organized a little Game-Art-Jam in Cologne. What? – You may ask. I'm not sure if someone else has done something similar before – probably yes – but also for me this kind of jam was new. It was a Game Jam that is focused on the creation of art. I had the concept for something like this spinning around in my head for quite some time and finally had the chance to try it out.
The Idea I'm doing a couple of gamedev events for quite a while now. And I also like game jams very much. So I always thought about organizing a game jam. Maybe not a big one – because this might need too much preparation – I more thought about a small one. Like the almost famous one-day Berlin Mini Jams. But I also know that one-day game jams can end up really exhausting for the participants. So I wanted to do something more relaxed – something like a Draw By Night event. In these 'nights' people are coming together and draw for just a few hours. I thought an event like this could also work in a gamedev-environment.
Since in the drawing event the participants were drawing together to create one piece of art, this was my intention for the game jam too. Everyone should work on his own assets and afterwards they would be connected together in a 3D Scene. Sure, this could end up in a mess of random stuff – but it could also lead to surprising, unexpected and beautiful results.
Preparation For a relaxed jam, you need an relaxed environment. That's at least my thought. Since I did a couple of events before, I knew that it is kind of easy to find a place for events in general. But it's not always easy to find and get a place that spreads a relaxed atmosphere and is convenient to work in. Through I go out a lot, a found out about the co-working space akkuraum that exactly meet these needs. It has a really cozy lounge that invites to work in. I pitched my event concept to the staff of this location and luckily they were interested to host the event.
For the event itself I prepared a little 3D game scene, that showed some samples. How to deal with 2D Images in a 3D space for example. And I also included some basic first person game mechanics, to have something to work with on the jam day. Furthermore I made a short introductory presentation, that explained the event briefly, which file formats to use etc.
Showtime When the participants had arrived, I held my little introductory presentation. After that we discussed an overall topic. So that the game scene got some consistence. I had a slight fear that we would agree on a too generic “fantasy”-topic. But that fear was unfounded – everyone had great ideas and we kinda could combine them all to one theme: 'Cute Sadness'. We also agreed on a specific color palette, which made the whole creative process more interesting. Next we discussed who would like to do what kind of asset and began to work. After like two hours, we all had finished our assets. I collected and put them in the prepared scene.
Under the participants was also an audio designer who made a little atmospheric sound track for our scene. He used head phones all the time so the rest of us had no clue what he was working on. So there was an even bigger “Show Off”-effect when the finished scene was displayed via an projector. His music track did totally fit to our art.
Aftermath To conclude, the Jam was very well perceived by the participants. Everybody had a lot of fun and enjoyed it. A bit negative from my perspective was, that we were just five people in total. Well, one of the reasons for that probably is, that I didn't make much advertisement for that event. I thought for trying out this jam format it would be good not to have too much people. But as the event announcement was received very well from the beginning, I expected two more people to show up at least . But as I wrote before, the event went very well, even if we were just five. And I can already imagine a lot of similar events. For example one that focuses just on experimenting with textures or programming procedural stuff. Events where people create something together within a certain topic, improve their workflows, skills and socialize. All in a relaxed atmosphere and just a few hours in the evening. But I'm not sure, if I will have time to organize this kind of events in the future... If not, I hope you will do ;) So hopefully you got some inspiration from this blog post.
And if you want to check out the final piece that we created in this evening, go here: https://epictigi.itch.io/cutesadness
See ya.














