Global Game Jam Keeps Designers Up All Night
Category: Noteworthy
At the fifth annual Global Game Jam—the world’s largest such event—thousands of game enthusiasts at more than 300 locations in 63 countries came together to design, develop, create and test original games based on a theme—all in the span of 48 hours.
During the weekend of Jan. 25-27, the University of Baltimore’s Simulation and Digital Entertainment program co-hosted one of many individual sites for the global jam at the Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville, Md.; teams of students, alumni and area game enthusiasts collaborated during a highly caffeinated, two-day-straight, no-sleep design-off.
Eleven UB students and alumni registered to participate in this year’s event at the Universities at Shady Grove, and six of them walked away with prizes from the local jam, judged by a jury of pros from Montgomery College, Towson University, UB and the game industry.
- Student Ben Baris was responsible for character art, animation and sound for the team that won the Jury Award for Heart of the Dead, a game about trying to survive as long as possible after contracting a lethal plague that turns victims into zombies.
- Students Justin Weese and Brandon Bishop made up half of the team that won the Audience Award for Do Sketches Dream of Love?, in which a sketched character must follow the sound of its own heartbeat to find love.
- Student Ricky McCallum and alumni Jenny Lees, B.S. ’10, and Mic Couture, B.S. ’09, won Honorable Mention along with their team for Do Not Resuscitate, a game about a heart on a rampage, aiming to destroy as much of the city as possible before doctors resuscitate it.