Last Friday we held our second virtual roundtable of the school year.
Below is a rough set of written notes from the meeting:
- Beware of body odor!
- Encourage participants to maintain proper personal hygiene: tell them to bring deodorant, toothpaste, and go home to shower if they can.
- If there’s a gym nearby, participants could have the option of using the gym’s showers.
- Make sure there’s decent circulation, depending on your location. Places with higher ceilings are usually better at hosting large groups of people. Consider getting fans to help with circulation.
- Game jams often attract people who have never made a game before: don’t ruin their first impression by having a smelly event!
- Helping students prepare for the event
- Chapters often host dedicate time during regular meetings to teach their members how to prepare for the game jam and what to expect.
- It’s also common to post guides with tips on the event’s website
- “Competition” vs “Just Have Fun”
- Most jams offer prizes for winners, while also encouraging participants to not get to stressed about winning. How do you find the right balance for your event?
- Think of your competition from a game design point of view. What are the mechanics for deciding winners? Is it popular vote from jam attendees? Do you have a panel of judges? How respected are the judges?
- What are your goals? If most participants are just getting started with making games, a sense of competition may be unnecessary or counterproductive. If a good number of your participants are comfortable making games, a sense of competition may help give them something to strive for with their project.
- The University of Arizona started giving out awards for a lots of categories. They wanted to reward more participants, especially since most participants were making their very first games.
- Different problems for jams at different scales
- The problems that you’ll have to solve for a 20-person game jam are very different from those of a 100-person event.
- Texas A&M University hosts Chillennium jam, the largest student-run game jam in the United States. They can’t be as informal as other events.
- Teams
- Most jams allow participants to form teams at the start of the event.
- Chillennium allows people to register teams before the event. RSVP form asks about experience level, and organizers use that to help people without teams form balanced teams.
- Set an expectation that you are allowed to change your team within the first 24 hours, because sometimes things just don’t work out.
- Have event organizers intervene when teams need to be split up or merged
- What other ways do you help newcomers at the jam?
- Some jams get mentors: professors, industry professionals, alumni / students with a lot of experience.
- Mentors walk around the event helping teams with specific questions and problems.
- Some jams offer workshops leading up to the event. Other jams offer workshops at the event.
- Sometimes workshops are hosted by sponsors. For example, Amazon likes to send tech evangelists to teach people how to develop for the Amazon Echo or Lumberyard engine.
- Sometimes students choose to drop out of the event. How do you try to deal with or avoid that problem?
- Most jams try hard to convince newcomers that they don’t need to know how to make games to enjoy the jam, but people still feel overwhelmed and disempowered.
- If one participant leaves, their teammates are more likely to leave. Important to have organizers intervene and help them balance out their team, or find new people to work with.
- Some chapters track how many people choose to drop out, and they try to minimize this number every jam.
- Some jams get mentors: professors, industry professionals, alumni / students with a lot of experience.
- Security
- Your venue may have specific requirements for how to keep the jam site secure.
- In general, you’ll need to have at least one organizer event and in the room, acting as security.
- This means you’ll need to have multiple organizers taking shifts.
- Some chapters get lanyards & badges/passes for everyone. Only people with a lanyard can get into the event.
- Others have a sign-in/sign-out sheet to keep track of everyone in the event location. Provides accountability if something is lost or stolen.
- Electrical safety
- Don’t daisy-chain power strips: don’t connect a power strip to another power strip. Get extension cords or heavy-duty power strips if you have to.
- Coordinate with your school or venue to get the resources that you need to maintain proper electrical safety standards
- Buy stuff if you have to, but see if you can borrow equipment first before buying.
- Funding
- Many schools offer some funding procedure for official school clubs.
- Also look at unofficial channels of funding, such as asking your department directly (example: game studies department, or computer science department)
- Some chapters try to keep the event free, while other charge an entry fee to help cover costs.
- If you make the event professional enough, you can charge for it. Conversely, if you charge for it, it may provide additional motivation for participants to take the event seriously and not abandon their project.
- If you use Eventbrite.com to sell tickets, as an academic chapter you can get a special discount for that service.
- Just contact students@igda.org to get access to the discount.
- Reach out to local companies, telling them that you’re an official IGDA academic chapter helps a lot.
- Ask for help funding specific things such as food or certain venue fees.
- Also offer something in return for their sponsorship, such as advertising space, a special mention during presentation, or the opportunity for them to give a presentation about their company or products to the jam participants.
- Easy for schools located next to big companies, but it also helps to be involved in the general professional scene of your area. You might find some indies who are interested in volunteering (they usually won’t donate).
- Many schools offer some funding procedure for official school clubs.
- Has anyone tried hosting a jam outside of school sessions, such as during winter/summer break?
- No, but multiple chapters have held some kind of events during break
- Turnout is pretty low in general. Students are often travelling home or on vacation
- One idea would be to host a “slow jam,” and online-only event where participants try to make a game over multiple weeks.
- Tips for getting the support of faculty?
- Teaming up with other schools and other IGDA chapters can help your event look more impressive to teachers.
- If you tell them that you have students from a neighboring school coming to participate in your jam, suddenly the department may be more interested in signal-boosting the event and maybe even funding it.