Anyone can make games

If you have never heard about Global Game Jam, it's an indie game making event hosted in dozens of countries and span more than a hundred locations worldwide, starting 2009.

There is basically no rule at all regarding how a team is made or what genre a game must be, except for a few topics that one should keep in mind while building the game. Although anybody is welcome to join, a required property of each person is "Passion", since it only lasts 48 hours from the beginning to the end, and there is no prize other than honor itself, so to speak.

In 2009 we had a game developed in XNA, because back then we had 2 programmers already knowing the basics of it, thanks to the class. So the idea is you have a pendulum dangling from above with an object attached to its end, and you only use one button to release the object, in order to form a barricade to shield the poor human beings from harm. But during the course you might kill them if it hits them.

Although we got very close to the mechanics we had wanted, there was no time left for fine-tuning the physics elements, which was one of the uncertainties that one must face.

And yes in 2010 I returned to the game jam and of course had a good time. This time we chose Flash as the platform that the game runs on, simply for its ubiquity on everybody's computers. The central concept is to use all sorts of sound effects to torture a prisoner, without telling the player what to do, hence I would rather call it a gadget rather than a video game.



Finally in hindsight, the lessons I learned from them is that the most successful teams would not make things from scratch, given how short the duration is, and should also stick with tried-and-true concepts. But being less adventurous, on the other hand, does not manifest the spirit of GGJ.