Hows it hanging folk? The JDE is here to tell you about this awesome event we just had!
This past weekend , August 3rd to August 5th, we had Chicago’s first tri college game jam. JDE teamed up with folks from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College to hold a killer event. We a huge turn out and was able to for about 6 groups for this jam.
The theme for this jam was Empathy; picked by our esteem panel of judges: Ali Cedroni, John Groot and Sarah Sexton. Ali Cedroni is a Columbia graduate who is currently a freelance Sound Designer finishing her last month at Jellyvision labs before moving to Oslo Norway to freelance full time. John Groot is a gameplay programmer currently working at Phosphor Studios. Before that he worked as a programmer and designer at Robomodo & was part of the team that created That Blooming Feeling which was featured at Indiecade 2017 and got an honorable mention nod at IGF 2018. Sarah Sexton is a software Engineer at Microsoft her focus areas include Mixed Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Recurrent Neural Networks, Game Dev, Mobile App Dev, and Web Dev. Co-founder of the Voxelles: Chicago’s Women in Game Development, a group committed to highlighting strengths and helping underrepresented demographics get involved in game development.
This jam was completely like no other for these schools. It was amazing seeing people share insight with each other, even though we’re literally a couple blocks away from each other. Everyone was astound at how similar, yet so different the programs were between us and sometimes the jam felt like an open panel on how to improve our community of developers as whole.
Some highlights were the small interactions between everyone and how each person brought something to the table. Columbia College usually does 15 people teams for their jams while DePaul University never interacts with the others colleges so this was a fresh perspective for everyone. Throughout the weekend it was super cool playing games and activities with each school as well. By the end it felt like everyone knew each other pretty well which confirmed our goal of bringing us together.
Thinking more about this, with such an interesting theme the groups came up with some interesting stuff! We ended up only having five groups complete and present their games but all the work was incredible! If you want more information about the individual games feel free to look at all the entries on our Itch.io jam entry page!
Congratulations to Loss: The Pilgrimage for winning first place in the jam!
Junior Development Experience (JDE) 