This Saturday, August 27, a game jam for Russian-speaking developers will begin, the participants of which will have to develop an HTML game on the Defold engine for a month to win. The interest in jam brought Russia to the top countries in terms of the number of registrations of the King engine.
The jam is called GamesJamDefold. It begins simultaneously with the international jam Ludum Dare 36, the theme of which will serve as the theme of “default”. The topic will be known at 5 am Moscow time on Saturday, August 27.
As part of the international jam for game development, developers will only have a weekend (jams usually last only a few days), and GamesJamDefold will last a month, until September 25.
The organizers explain the large time frame by the fact that sometimes “among all the games developed “quickly” there are projects that “have found something worthwhile.” For them, the long road to turning the project from jam into a product begins. That’s what GamesJamDefold is for.”
Blossom Blast Saga, developed on Defold
At the end of the jam, the three best teams will receive tickets and a stand for White Nights Moscow 2016, which will be held on October 11-12, Scream School will award the winner a grant to study at the faculty of “Producing online Games”, and King will give the three best projects according to the users’ version of the brand new iPad Pro 9.7″. There will be more prizes (full list prizes here).
The peculiarity of a particular jam is that the community of the Defold engine, developed by King, organized itself for its implementation and found organizations and services that were ready to support it.
“Of course. The community self-organized on a game jam about Defold (King’s new 2D engine), immediately found partners who decided to support with prizes and gifts. Community activists filed the first splints in Russian and … In general, it turned out very interesting and unexpected,” Oleg Pridyuk, an evangelist at King, comments on the event.
Oleg Pridyuk
“Today, after the morning meeting, a colleague sends me a picture with analytics and a big question mark: “do you know what’s going on?”.
Suddenly, Russia jumped to second place in the number of new registrations of Defold users,” Oleg said in an interview with App2Top.ru – “I’m talking about game jam, about a wonderful community, about the incredible support of the industry, prizes and gifts from partners, about training materials in Russian. Colleagues from the office gather around us. “And we support it all, right? We’re going to give something, aren’t we?” I’m telling you about our participation in the White Nights conference, about the stand with the best games from jam, about the brand new iPad Pro for jam lovers. I promise to inspire the Swedish community to take the same initiative. The guys are pretty dispersed. After half an hour, they take off my headphones again: “what is it VK.com and why is there a lot of transitions from it to defold.com ?”. I’m telling you about the 4th most popular website in the world, the GamesJam community, the Russian Defold community, training materials from Alexey Gulev. Colleagues nod uncomprehendingly. It’s just that the community has organized itself into a game jam on the Defold engine. They will be making games for a whole month. It is difficult for me to explain to my colleagues from King how and why this happened. It’s important to them that we support it all. I am insanely glad to have the support of friends and colleagues. I really want this initiative of the Russian-speaking community to turn into something more. We will work in this direction.”
For those who are still poorly oriented in Defold, a special channel has been launched in Slack, where they will help in Russian with any issues with the engine.
Source: King, GamesJamDefold