Double Union Game Jam recap
Yesterday I cohosted with a woman named Snail a game jam at Double Union, a feminist hacker space in San Francisco. The game jam was targeted at women and gender-nonbinary people and the goal was to reach out to people who might not be participating in SF’s existing indie/gamejam culture. We opened with a class on Twine I taught (my class notes are here)and then ran for about four hours before showing what we’d made. It seemed to go really well! We got about 12 people plus the normal Double Union Saturday crowd, and every single person who stayed to participate wound up making a game.
Here’s some of the games we made– all of them can be played in a browser:
Gina made A Grim Task, a really intense short story about volunteering at a nonprofit.
Haley made “LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT LIL B THE BASED GOD”. The name describes it pretty well.
Wonja made two games:
Lizard Quest, an INCREDIBLY AMAZING adventure game.
Hallway, a, uh… experimental experience.
Kanane made The Huntress, an impressively polished fantasy story.
I actually made a couple small things!:
San Francisco Quest, which I actually made during the Twine class at the beginning as a demonstration of how to use Twine. It’s very very short, probably the smallest a game could legally be without getting into trouble with the Game Police.
I then *tried* to make a Pacman clone, but it took me a really long time to fix some bugs where I couldn’t get anything at all to draw (it turns out C++/OpenGL is a really bad choice for a four-hour jam). By the time I got that fixed, I was out of time, so I couldn’t add anything like interactivity. So I decided the result was Social Anxiety Pac Man, a game where all you can do is stand in a maze immobilized by your choices. (The link goes to an image, not the game. Trust me, it’s the same experience.)
Snail, my cohost, made Another City, a really funny hallucinatory story that to me feels reminiscent of San Francisco Quest only better. She says this link is a “demo” she’ll finish later, some of the paths don’t complete.
Seanna made How To Be Successful. This one is actually really cool, it’s a Twine game consisting of nothing except pictures.
Alicia made the one non-Twine game of the jam, Make the kitties happy!. This one is totally adorable, you have some cats and you have to make them all happy at the same time by giving them what they want. Hint: You can change the tool selected (at the top) by clicking on it. (You may have to run this in Firefox.)
Jenn made Lady Bird and Tiger Bear, a short fairy tale.
And our two last participants, Tyler and Hannah, made complex Twine stories about, respectively, memories you can hold in your hand and a epic struggle to make yourself a sandwich. These haven’t been posted on the Internet yet but I played the sandwich one and it was really good.
Overall I’m really happy with how the jam turned out. We talked at the end and we are planning to do this again at minimum and hopefully expand this into a larger recurring women+nonbinary game making group. There seemed to have been more people who were interested in participating but couldn’t because of the limited space at DU, so we want to give them a chance to do that next time. Our current plan now that the jam is out of the way is to start doing a monthly Twine writer’s group at Double Union, and in a couple months do another game-making-class+gamejam like the one yesterday. Next time we’ll be teaching Stencyl. We should have more details soon, so keep an eye out!