What is Global Game Jam?
The goal of Global Game Jam is to bring people together to create video games or nondigital games, like board or card games. Participants, also known as jammers, work together to rapidly prototype game designs and hopefully create inspiring new ideas that contribute to the growth of the games industry. All Global Game Jam sites share a common theme and jam diversifiers subthemes that provide additional, but optional, structure to jammers. We ask participants to create an original game inspired by the jam’s theme within a prescribed time no larger than 48 hours. The brief time span is meant to help encourage creative thinking to result in small, but innovative, experimental games. Please note: Global Game Jam is not a competition.
Basic Schedule
Each Global Game Jam 2016 location starts at 5 PM local time on Friday the 29th. It ends at 3 PM local time on Sunday afternoon. We have presentations begin at 4:30pm. Actual development time for jammers is generally less than 48 hours but the whole GGJ16 experience spans the entire time.
Entering Games
All games need be uploaded to the GGJ server before the jam is complete. All content needs to be on our server by 5 PM local time Sunday. Sharing and showing your work is a core GGJ philosophy, so we ask that not only game executables be uploaded, but also source code, assets, makefiles, and anything else needed to compile your game. We suggest you offer participants a compressed ZIP file (which we are providing via Slack) with a template of a game directory structure, so they can easily organize their executable, code and assets before uploading. All GGJ jammers hold IP rights to their games and file uploads are shared under the Creative Commons’ Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license (allows for others to share & alter, but not sell more info in the FAQ) .
Uploading Games
Upload instructions & guides will be provided to jam organizers via Slack. Basic schedules generally require uploads to begin between 35PM local time on Sunday.
Registration, Teams and Participants
All participants who want to get credit for their game need to go to globalgamejam.org and create a profile, join our jam site’s page: http://globalgamejam.org/2016/jam-sites/global-game-jam-uw-whitewater, and associate themselves with their uploaded game. If it doesn’t exist, the game needs to have a project page be created online by a team member first.