Festival2012/Submit/Jam It

Jam It: Your code sucks and that's okay!

• Title of session: Jam It: Your code sucks and that's okay!
• Your name and affiliation: Alex Schwartz - Founder, CEO, and Janitor of Owlchemy Labs (award winning game development studio)
• Session format Fireside Chat

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

This will be a frank, no-holds-barred discussion on why I think most people are doing game jams and hackathons all wrong. I find that many participants in hackathons put minutes or hours into some sort of future-proofing of their code, whether it be wasting 5 minutes thinking about extensibility, code cleanliness, plug-and-play with existing code, etc. My view is that it's all about speed and proving a concept, not about code quality, code extensibility, or even the code at all. ALL that matters is the end product, and anyone who plans on re-using hackathon code is *insane* to plan for that! 110% of your time needs to be making content and getting it up on screen as fast as possible.

How do you see that working?

I imagine this will consist of sharing my experiences with the crowd, getting feedback from the crowd on some of the best ways to run/participate in a hackathon/gamejam. This session should be helpful for planning the Game Arcade!

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

Since it will be formatted as a conversation, as long as people take turns speaking, larger numbers shouldn't be a problem. ;)

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

This chat should be fairly self-explanatory to communicate after the fact.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

Better understanding of the goals and process of creating something showable/usable/playable at a hackathon/gamejam.