Festival2012/Submit/Mind Candy Mash Up

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  • Title of session: Mash Up with Mind Candy
  • Your name and affiliation: Mark Baker, Moo Yu, Simon Hill from Mind Candy
  • Session format: Design Challenge (part of Game Arcade)

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

At Mind Candy we make Moshi Monsters for the web, mobile and 'real world' as well! Because we love creating new games, we have a regular Game Jam where we have an hour or three to make up a fun new game from scratch using any technology (even paper and pen). We have also run and hosted other game jams, including the Best of British jam

What we want to do is run a 3 hour session that is a Game Jam on HTML5 tech, challenging participants to just get anything running that's playable and fun! We will bring experience of coming up with & implementing new games really quickly (and usually badly, to comic effect) and be around to help brainstorm games and help with implementation issues too, as many of us have been in the Games Industry for some time and are old hands at this stuff ;)

How do you see that working?

First 30 minutes -- quick intro to basic 'how to make games' and introducing our basic HTML5 game that people can then use for hacking on top of. Introduce the game jam and the videogame name generator.

Next 2 hours -- people divide into teams (max 4 people), generate a random name and get hacking! We will not form a team ourselves but will go from group to group providing support and direction.

Last 30 minutes -- everyone shows off their game and we will pick a winner (we might even have a prize!)

For the tech itself we will probably use Cocos2d Javascript. Open to other suggestions, and in any case would let everyone use whatever they want, if they have a lot of knowledge of something else.

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

  • 5 people -- we'll split into a couple of teams and work with them directly
  • 15 people -- a few more teams, probably 5. Small enough group for people to self-organise teams.
  • 50 people -- will need a LOT of teams and probably get people to group up with "whoever you are sat next to". May bring in reinforcements from Mind Candy HQ to help out!

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

Should be very quickly! We're mainly passing on experience and passion and really anyone can run their own game jam, once they see how simple it is. We will stick the base game up on the web for anyone to use in the future if they want to run their own jams.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

People get the bug for making games in HTML5! People can run their own 'game jams' The world gets some more awesome games!