As all good things must to come to an end, we too are fast approaching the end of the evangelistic movement started by Mindbox and Nasscom (for this year atleast) as GameJam Titans now gallops along to its final destination in New Delhi beginning this Friday; but before that let’s see what the ‘city of dreams’ had in store for us as we take a quick look at the Mumbai proceedings.
The theme that was given to the school kids was to create a game using any platform or software around either ‘line’ or ‘childhood’, whereas the theme for the college/professional participants was a toss between ‘trip’ and ‘performance’. 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 Mumbai comprised of Sailesh Prabhu, founder Yellow Monkey Studios; Shubhank from Viacom18 and for a first time a female jury member in Mohini Dutta, founder Antidote Games.
One of the jury members, Mohini 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. And hope there is active participation always for such events.”
With the choice being between ‘line’ and ‘childhood’, 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.
“Though I appreciate such an initiative that has been taken on by Mindbox and Nasscom, what I truly believe is that these kids are too young to be forced into making games on complicated platforms such as Unity, that too so young. What I would rather have them do is play and study as many games as they can and at the same point on time pick up skills on game development and game design along the way,” expressed the passionate Shubhank.
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. We can’t wait for the NASSCOM game developers conference in November.”
It was now the turn of the college/professionals from the city to showcase their games to the judges. With only four teams turning up, it was a rather disappointing turn-out, nevertheless as the saying goes ‘the show must go on’ so it very well did; the theme given to this category was a choice between ‘trip’ or ‘performance’, and almost all four teams attempted to incorporate both these elements in their games.
“I am a bit disappointed with the turn-out for this category, reason unknown… but nevertheless since the teams that have turned up have made an effort to create a game for our judging then we will certainly do justice to them,” smiled Sailesh.
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.
The penultimate chapter of GameJam Titans came to an end in Mumbai with a bang, and the city has certainly sprung a few good games; the final city on the cards is New Delhi, but that is a different story for a different day! Watch this space to catch all the news and updates on GameJam Titans.