Greenlight Jam 2023 Kickoff and Welcome
Discord: / discord
Itch Page: https://itch.io/jam/greenlight-jam
Transcript
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Hello everyone and welcome to Greenlight Jam! We’re so excited to have you joining us this year. My name is MJ Johns and I’ll be one of your hosts along with Tyler Coleman and our friends over at IndieCade and EGaDS.
I wanted to take a moment to explain Greenlight Jam for those who are joining us for the first time this summer. A game jam is typically a short period of time where people come together to make games for fun. You do not need any specific experience to participate in a game jam and it is often a place where novices make their very first game.
Greenlight Jam is a bit longer than a typical jam - it runs for 5 weeks and is broken down into sprints to match the typical format of the professional game development cycle. The first sprint is Concept where you come up with ideas, make concept art, find references, and narrow down and solidify the idea you want to make. The Concept sprint lasts one week and you can see the start and end times for your local timezone by visiting the itch page.
The second sprint is also one week and it is the Prototype phase where you start building. At this stage you might make discoveries about your idea and need to pivot, or you might even choose to prototype multiple ideas from the concept phase to help choose the best way forward. Prototypes are not meant to be a final product but rather an early playable version that helps you make decisions.
The third sprint is Production and it is the longest one, two weeks instead of one, and it is the time when you actually build out the fully playable game including making art and sound and implementing the gameplay. Finally the fifth week of the jam is the Polish and Release sprint and ideally during this last week you will publish your game.
So that’s the structure of Greenlight Jam, now let’s talk about how to get started. Hopefully you have already joined the Discord for the jam which is where most of our communication will take place. Today your goal is to find a team. If you haven’t already done so, you can get the Looking for a Team role from the Roles channel on Discord and then post in the channel to introduce yourself and reply to others who you might be interested in working with. We also have Voice Channels for mixers where you can hop in to talk to people.
Once you have found some folks to work with, post in the get-team-channels following the instructions and we will make a team channel for your group. You should do this even if your already knows each other and has a separate Discord, because we use these team channels to keep track of which teams are participating in the jam.
If you prefer to work alone, we do have the Solo Jammer role you can choose, and we also have a Solo Jammer channel so those working solo can hang out and talk to each other and form a community.
Once you have your team sorted out, you can start brainstorming your idea and dive into the concept sprint. There is no theme for this jam, but we do have diversifiers which I will go over now.
Diversifiers are words or phrases to use as a prompt during brainstorming and the intent is that they help generate more unique ideas than what might be made in a professional game development setting, therefore diversifying the results. You are not required to use a diversifier, but we really recommend looking through them and seeing if one or more seems meaningful to you. And you can choose more than one - sometimes really great things happen when you try to achieve 3 or 4 diversifiers with one game idea.
So take a look at the diversifiers, introduce yourself in the Discord, hop into a mixer, and start jamming. Be sure to join the itch page along with your team, since that is where you will submit your results of each sprint. If you have any questions for us you can post them in the Ask an Admin channel.
Good luck, have fun. We can’t wait to see what you make!