What is the Triangle Game Jam?
The Triangle Game Jam is a gathering of professional Game Developers local to the research triangle area of North Carolina. The Game Jam occurs over the course of a single weekend, during which the participants attept to design and implement original video games.
All of the games are expected to conform to a common theme that is decided before the event, although the specific game ideas are typically decided upon once the event starts.
Typically, at the beginning of the event everyone will have a chance to pitch game ideas to the group. After a good number of concepts have been proposed, the group discusses them in order to determine which ones would be the best suited to actually implement. Groups then form around the concepts that seem the most promising.
The flow of the event is not rigid and does not have rules and regulations. It is not competetive, and many participants end up contributing to multiple game projects.
Triangle Game Jam 2007
Theme: "Triangle"
The first Triangle Game Jam took place in June 2007. It was sponsored and hosted by Peak 10 Data Center. The chosen theme for the Game Jam was simply the word "Triangle", however the developers chose it interpret it.
XNA was chosen as the development platform because it is easy to learn and use. Those qualities combined with its features make it well suited for the sort of rapid prototyping work we were doing.
Dana Cowley took pictures of the event, which you can find in the Triangle Game Jam Set.
Twelve people contributed, and at the end of the weekend there were 5 games.
Participants:
- Dan Amerson
- Dana Cowley
- Rett Crocker
- Mike Daly
- John Dinley
- Wes Hunt
- Scott Jacobs
- Chris Roby
- Demond Rogers
- Vince Scheib
- Patrick Sebring
- Chris Stoy
Games:
- Menage A Tug
- Shape Slasher
- Stretch
- Tribuilder
- Trixxon
Triangle Game Jam 2008
Theme: "Mad Libs"
The second Triangle Game Jam took place May 10-11 2008. It was hosted in the office of Emergent Game Technologies. The idea behind the theme was for each participant to come with 3 lists of 5 words each: a list of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Everyone enters their words in the database and at the beginning of the event we have a script generate a big pile of video game titles that are random combinations of each participants' words.
Each person picked out a generated game title and pitched the corresponding game concept to the group. It was tough to try to narrow it down to only a few because a lot of good ideas were pitched.
Once again, we chose XNA as a common development platform. Microsoft provided Academic Creator's Club memberships for those that wanted to port their games to Xbox 360.
Participants
- Brad Acree
- Rett Crocker
- Mike Daly
- Nick Darnell
- Jonathan Fischoff
- Wes Hunt
- Randy Nash
- Michael Noland
- Vincent Scheib
- Patrick Sebring
- Bruce Shankle
- Nolan Walker