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More than 200 people take part in Global Game Jam at Abertay
Games about ramen, socks and hitting things with hammers were among the highlights at the innovation-heavy annual Global Game Jam at Abertay University.
More than 200 students, alumni, academics and local game developers packed out Abertay’s Centre for Excellence and newly videogames and cybersecurity space for the event, in which participants get together and create a finished game in just 48 hours.
Tens of thousands of people take part in Global Game Jam each year. In 2019, 9010 games were created across 113 different countries.
This year, game makers followed the same international theme of ‘repair’.
ABOVE: Ramen Repair
Among the 50 games developed at Abertay were Ramen Repair; a quirky game about fixing vases with noodles, Sock and a Hard Place; a game about re-uniting lost socks, and Doktor Hammer’s Percussive Maintenance; a game in which uses a makeshift hammer as a controller.
Gareth Robinson, a lecturer in Abertay’s Division of Games Technology and Mathematics, said: “The Global Game Jam is all about collaboration, between our students and academics but also industry professionals and our returning alumni who come to take part each year and create unique, funny, exciting ideas. So many of these break the mould of traditional games, and that really fits well with our ethos at Abertay”
“The things our students and friends come up with every time we host a Jam never fails to surprise me; this year is no different, we’ve seen some great projects and I’m already excited to see what next year brings.”
ABOVE: Sock and a Hard Place
Abertay launched the world’s first videogames degree in 1997 and has since been at the forefront of a sector which is now worth more than the film and music industries combined.
The prestigious Princeton Review has ranked Abertay as the number one University in Europe for undergraduate videogames degrees for the last five years, and within the top ten at postgraduate level.
