Global Game Jam 2016

Global Game Jam is an annual world-wide game jam organized around a common theme. This year’s iteration took place this past weekend at 632 different sites, resulting in 6831 brand-new games made in 48 hours, (I made a card game.)

In addition to the theme, Global Game Jam includes extra goals called diversifiers. 399 of the games used the “To infinity and beyond” diversifier, which required using procedural generation in their games. Which means that there are now nearly four hundred new games in existence that use procedural generation than there were last week.

Game jams have become a part of the culture of indie game development, and many past success stories were originally made as jam games. A lot of the experimentation that pushes the artistic conversation forward comes out of them (plus it’s a great place to meet people who are also interested in making games).