Article Japan Times

Category: , By Khaeon
In no small measure thanks to Mike and Mark, an article in the Japan Times about the Gamejam! Read it here: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nc20080319a1.html
 

The Jam Continues ...

Category: By Khaeon

Just posting a note to say that we had a lot of fun last weekend! It was truly impressive and inspiring to see the enthusiasm and drive that everyone was putting into the event and see it reflected in the results. This event is definitely worth repeating and I hope that next time more teams will join in and the event can keep exhibiting the kind of creative talent and willingness to create games that was clearly present during the weekend.

In our mind and reality: The Jam Continues! That thought also prompts me to ask all of you to stay in touch and contribute comments, hints, tips and tricks so that we can make this work! I honestly feel that everyone has won something last weekend, even though not all teams could continue into the next round. Will keep you posted, that's a promise.

And, of course, a warm thanks to everyone who made this possible!!

All the best and until next year!

The Khaeon Team
 

Some photos online

By O!















Click here to see some photos of this weekend

:)

 

SuperAwesomeMegaMegaUberZord Team Tales

Category: By Paul
Greetings and a smile from the SuperAwesomeMegaMegaUberZord Team. After a good night (and day) of sleeping and a nice shower, it is time to tell some of the SuperAwesomeMegaMegaUberZord stories. Enjoy!

We started out with a good game of writing random words on a big piece of paper. After having assembled as many different words as we could, we started erasing most of them, and somehow, three wonderfull concepts emerged.

First one was a two player ice skating game. As some new Japanese mobiles have Wii-like motionsensors in them (an essential feature which makes people wonder how we ever even made phonecalls without Wii-like motionsensors) we thought it would be rather cool to make good use of this. The Big Idea was to make to people skate towards each other, using the tilt motion of the phone to generate speed. And as our apple laptops also had a motion sensor built in (another feature which makes you wonder how we could ever write blogs and watch youtube without a motionsensor) we thought it would be cool to build & show a playable demo. A descision which soon kept us from having any sleep.

The second idea we called 'Trade', a game with the objective of collecting and trading typical Dutch & Japanese stuff. (you know, cheese ands Wii's) Players could become extremely wealthy by buying stuff for cheap and selling for a lot. But as our team consisted of some bunch of treehuggin' hippies, nobody really cared about becoming extremely wealthy and eventually, we dropped the concept.

The third idea emerged when one of us hippies said out of nothing: "farmers golf". these two words inspired us towards a concept to use the phone as a golfclub and the world as green playing ground. In contrary to the first idea, nobody with an apple was very enthusiastic of using his laptop as a golfclub, so we decided to make a teaser video instead. See below.



Having been busy all night with coding, drawing, beer and starcraft, we eventualy got the motionsensor to work the way we liked it. Unfortunately, this was not before 4 o'clock and there was very little time to implement the artwork into the game. Which is a big shame for our lead designer, because all his cool drawings got lost for the presentations to the public. Which of course made us totally lose to all the other teams. So, in order to rescue his art from oblivion, below is one of the drawings he made for farmers golf.

We had a really cool time on the GameJam and when someday scientist have found comfortable a way to skip sleeping, we will be doing this stuff every weekend.
 

BE COOL!

Category: , , , , By Robbie Networks
We from Robbie Networks and Lunagames had a great and inspiring weekend.
The introduction about Japan showed us a lot of opportunities and challenges in the mobile environment.

The Gamejam weekends will make a real difference and will put Utrecht and Holland on the map of the international game development industry.
It's impressive to see what people can do in this short amount of time! It confirms that we are surrounded with very talented people and its something to be proud of...

Thank you all and NLGD, The Game Factory for creating this platform of opportunities and of course the proper organization and relaxing atmosphere.

If you need our avatar/character developers kit please feel free to contact us!

Stephan Aarts
 

Thank you!

By O!
Team O! would like to thank the organisation for a wonderful weekend. Everything was arranged so well! We had our own room to work in, we got breakfast, lunch and dinner, snacks, drinks and a Sony PS3 with Rockband to play with.

Our team had a great weekend with lots of laughter and not much sleep .. At some moment, right before the presentation we were thinking to ourselves what on earth got into us - crunch time on a Sunday evening!

It was so cool to see the diversity of all the people and game concepts - all in two days! And who would have thought our team with our concept 'happyard' would end up with the last three .. Wow!



Again, heaps of thanks go out to organisation, sponsors and other teams for this great experience and congratulations to the teams of the two selected concepts - they were very nice and have great potential!

- matthijs
 

Jammin'

By Jasper



Ronimo is also representing, after a hectic, fun Saturday, which we used to explore the wonderous world of “Rock Band”. We got some good night sleep and managed to get an actual concept on the table this morning. Hope we can get it ready for the deadline today!

Pizza was nice yesterday, this morning it was a little bit better!! :)

 

Re-Introducing Oranda-Jin Triad

By Z.

With a little help of Salary-man, the Oranda-Jin Triad settled into their "office/sleephub/ideabubble" at floor TwoPointFive.
After getting introduced to Micah's theoretical framework, the Oranda-Jin Triad started to go crazy with ideas, turning ideas into concepts eventually. Great concepts came along, the only hard part seemed to be the concept of "kill your darlings". After several fierce battles we managed to have three well-rounded concepts. Which ones? Just wait and see! Because we are..... no 1! Or so it says on the door.

To give an impression of whom the Oranda-Jin Triad team consists of, we (or our ever resourceful Hatamoto) came up with a representational graphic of our strengths, so without further ado, we present our teammembers:

Micah Hrehovcsik aka Hatamoto:








Leo Buntjer aka Wan-Master:








Zuraida Buter aka Yukizoe:








Want to know what will happen to this team in the near future? Watch this place!
 

Windmill Factory reporting!

By Sander van Leth

Hey guys this is Sander from Windmill Factory, letting you all know that all is going swimmingly! We've got some great ideas floating around that we can't wait to show you all tomorrow (or is it today?)

We're 6 students from (mostly) HKU game design. The team consists of 2 programmers(Jay and Anne), 2 artists (Rian and Marjolein), a sound designer (Sanjay) and myself as team leader/chief designer.





We just want to let you all know it's been great for us to work in such a creative environment, with great people to play Rock Band with (Rawk!). We'll be sure to post more later on!
 

O! .. Morgen?

By O!




"Oh! .. Tomorrow!?" was the reaction from everyone when the team was assembled last minute, yesterday evening .. Although more people responded with great enthusiasm, five could actually make time to come .. Everyone's first reaction seemed a nice name for our ad-hoc formed team:

- Florus van Beek
- Joost Broersen
- Rick Companje
- Ralph Kok
- Matthijs Rouw

The team members were connected via each other but did not know each other in person yet .. It's an HKU/Uni Leiden combination and a great way to meet new and interesting people and until now, we've had heaps of laughter .. I wonder what the result will be tomorrow evening ;)

We will probably not be firing away with tons of ideas .. the presentation will likely be of one major concept and several proofs of concept (interaction wise) ..

- matthijs
 

Oranda-Jin Triad presenting themselves

By Z.

Wan-Master, Hatamoto, Yukizoe
Artwork by Hatamoto
 

Ready, set, go!

By Stichting NLGD
In het weekend van 8 /9 maart vindt de Japan GameJam plaats in het kantoor van de Stichting NLGD. Het doel van deze Japan GameJam is het ontwerpen van een mobiele telefoongame voor de Japanse Markt Op dit blog kunnen de deelnemende teams aan de Japan GameJam de voortgang van de door hen gemaakte concepten bijhouden.