Developers, journalists and students recognised at the inaugural talent-swap games jam
Top teams of journalists, developers and students have been recognised at this weekend's JournoDevSwap event, which ended moments ago with the gathering's award ceremony.
The event, presented in the 48 hour games jam format, challenged developers and journalists to swap roles, meaning established scribes spent the weekend developing a game, while their counterparts covered the event as press, posting stories, previews, reviews and opinion pieces here on Develop.
The theme for the game jam was 'Swap', and the titles created were Gi Joyce, Double Droids, Just Like Real Life and Split Destiny.
Lionhead staffer Mark Backler won the award for best developer-turned-journalist (pictured), recognised for his quality of writing and dedication to the task in hand.
"I really didn't expect this," said Backler (top), taking to the stage to accept his award. "All the writing by everybody from this weekend was great."
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Meanwhile Guardian games journalist Keith Stuart and his development student coding partner Theo Chin (above) scooped the prize for best game made by a journalist, with their dual-play auto-running game Double Droids.
"I really owe it to Theo for all his help," insisted Stuart.
Despite the victory of the winners, everybody involved contribute a huge effort. You can read all the news written by the games developers here, and keep an eye out on Develop for playable versions of each game.
The JournoDevSwap event was organised by UKIE CEO Jo Twist (above) and games consultant Will Luton.
The journalists-turned developers were CVG's Rob Crossley, RockPaperShotgun's Dan Griliopoulos, Lewie Procter of RPS and Savvy Gamer, and Keith Stuart from The Guardian,
The developers serving as journalists were Spilt Milk's Andrew Smith, Peter Theophilus-Bevis from Blitz, Mark Backler of Lionhead, and Jim Griffiths from Media Tonic.
Huge thanks must go to the event's starts, a group of games development students from the University of Derby, who assisted with the development process throughout the weekend. They were Karn Bianco, Jake Woodruff, Chris Barnes, Luc Shelton, Kevin chandler, Theo Chin and David Jones.
Some of the student developers with Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson
So did the developers have help from journalists? Or did they do all their own reporting and writing? And one of the articles said the journalists went missing. How much development did the journalists actually do? They all had 'help' from student programmers?
All I've got from these articles is that games journalism is easy peasy for developers and games development is too hard for journalists. What a surprise!
I think that's a pretty unfair summing up of the event. Obviously, it's going to be easier for the devs because they have an understanding of the English language while I *don't* have an understanding of C#. However, it wasn't a scientific experiment to see who would find it easier - it was about getting the chance to see things from the other's perspective. And actually, the developers found the task of writing interesting articles to very strict deadlines quite stressful - they were certainly more worried about the prospect than us writers were about making games.
As for what the writers contributed, I can't talk for the others, but I did all the art direction - I photographed the textures, sourced all the images, came up with the look of the game and worked with the artist Jake to get it all consistent. I made and edited the sound effects, and (Theo assures me) I helped with debugging because I asked questions about the logical process of why certain things weren't working. I also fetched him a lot of Tango.
I had about seven hours sleep over the entire weekend and left the building twice to get food. And I learned so much about the development process and specifically about Unity. I hope I brought some of that across in the live blog I produced during the event.
So yes, there might not have been many surprises, but there was an awful lot of fun, creativity and learning. And we all produced a working game.
Thanks for the comment, Keith.
It truly was inspiring to see people out of their comfort zone and rising to the challenge.
Here's the link to Keith's liveblog on The Guardian for anyone thinking cynical thoughts - this might shut you up: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/gamesblog/2012/oct/05/games-festival-game-jam
This put a smile on my face, I think these jams (in whatever format) are a really good idea ands show how far things have moved forward in the industry.
Of course the Internet has a lot to do with this, so that we can all enjoy and share, it's just a shame it also opens the door for needless negative comments.
