As all good things must to come to an end, we too have reached the end of the evangelistic movement started by Mindbox and Nasscom (for this year atleast) as GameJam Titans ended its dream run of travelling across the length and breadth of the nation in its course also educating the young minds on how to build a career in this exciting field.
The theme that was given to the school kids was to create a game using any platform or software around either ‘marathon’ or ‘Brazil’, whereas the theme for the college/professional participants was a toss between ‘line’ and ‘universe’. The school kids were given a day’s tutorial on using Unity by the team at Mindbox, a week prior to the showcase date.
The student category saw over 20 teams coming in comprising of nearly 120 kids, with the youngest participants being mere seventh graders and the oldest in class eleven. The jury for Delhi comprised of Anando from Lakshya Digital, Kinshuk Sunil from HashStash and Amit Goyal from SuperSike Games.
One of the jury members, Anando said: “These kids are lucky to have such a platform for themselves at such a young age. I would like to applaud the effort of the organisers to think of such an initiative.”
With the choice being between ‘marathon’ and ‘Brazil’, the kids created some really interesting games and some just blew away the minds of the jury keeping in mind that most of these games were created in just over two or three days.
“It’s truly inspiring to see kids this young coming and using this platform to create games, I don’t think we would have even managed to sit in one place for such a long time that these kids have created a game at this age,” expressed Amit.
The jury went across to each of the participating teams and played & tested the games over the next five hours. On winning in the school category, the team members jointly said: “We really would like to thank the organisers for giving us an opportunity to not just participate in this contest, but also be trained in using the Unity software and create a game that we believed in.”
It was now the turn of the college/professionals from the city to showcase their games to the judges. With nearly 15 teams turning up, it was a rather good turn-out, the theme given to this category was a choice between ‘line’ or ‘universe’, and almost all teams attempted to incorporate both these elements in their games.
“I am heartened to see such a good turnout in New Delhi for this category, which means that the indie game development scene is slowly blossoming in this part of the nation as well. We also have someone coming from a small town near Raipur and people travelling from Udaipur for this event which is really very encouraging,” smiled Kinshuk.
The jury was reasonably surprised with the result, and the thought that went behind each game. Most of the games used both the themes in their gameplay and tried using different mechanics for their games.
“We are elated and ecstatic, we can’t believe we won, we will certainly develop the game further and would bring an even more playable and desirable game to Pune for the NGDC,” beamed the winning team.
This brings us to the close of the first edition of GameJam Titans, it was a great initiative by Mindbox and NASSCOM to evangelise game development in the country and this has certainly managed to open up the doors for many more young individuals to think of this field as a serious career opportunity and also something they can pursue as a hobby in the future.