Students code through the night as biggest ever Game Jam kicks off

MSc Computer Games and Entertainment students at Goldsmiths, University of London have been camping out in their labs, taking part in a nationwide competition to create an exciting new computer game in just 36 hours.

This year’s three Goldsmiths teams – Team BobCat, rigid_body, and Chi Po Ro – are hoping to follow in the footsteps of last year’s Goldsmiths students, who took the top prize in the annual Ukie Student Game Jam.

Our students are being mentored throughout the competition by top figures in the gaming industry, Ed Fear (Mediatonic), Elisha Brown (Next Gen Skills Academy) and Katherine Bidwell (State of Play). Game Jam is an important event for participants, with their final games contributing to their portfolios.

This year’s theme, ‘Identity Crisis’ was announced at 9.30am on Monday 11 May and the teams have until midnight on 12 May to create a game. Fourteen teams from seven universities are taking part, with the winner revealed on Thursday 14 May.

Bobcat v. Chi Po Ro v. rigid_body

Team rigid_body (Aldo Curtis, Andrea Castegnaro, Sam Hayhurst, Richard Fox, Sokol Murturi) are designing the game ‘Super Spy: Identity Crisis’ in which the player undertakes a super-secret spy mission to stop ‘the evil boss baddie’ from carrying out his evil plan.

Sam explains: “This is a conversation game based around a seven year old’s make believe spy adventure, complete with pipe cleaners, googly eyes and sequins. The player has to manage their disguise, which will change the information which can be garnered from different conversations. To proceed the player needs to use clues from previous conversation in order to assume the correct disguise for the next level.”

Team Bobcat (Tahmoor Hussain, Baggio Pereira, Linh Nguyen, James Jeffrey) are working on a game where the player has to, under a time limit, locate a specific character in a room full of characters that look exactly the same, using just a change in screen colour and a heartbeat sound that gets faster as the player gets closer to the right character.

If a player guesses the correct character, the door will open and they move on to the next room, full of even more characters in the room, and the game becomes harder.

Team Chi Po Ro (Stefana Ovesia, Adrian Baciuc, Paul Eliasz, Pedro Quijada) are creating a 2D game in which the player controls the character and the environment with their voice. “It fits in the theme of the Game Jam because the player is either shouting, clapping, humming or being silent, showing the different emotions one would go through during an identity crisis,” explains Stefana.

Ukie (UK Interactive Entertainment) is the only trade body for the UK's games and wider interactive entertainment industry. Their annual Student Games Jam takes place across UK universities. To find out more about the competition and judging criteria, visit http://ukie.org.uk/event/2015/05/11/annual-ukie-student-game-jam

Find out more about the Department of Computing and MSc Computer Games and Entertainment.