Since leaving the Army in 2012 and making Hawaii my permanent home, I’ve been interested in trying to grow Hawaii’s tech community. While pursuing this long-term goal, I met Peter Justeson, a local game developer and the president of the local International Game Developers Association (IGDA) chapter, who suggested one way to achieve that goal was to start participating in the Global Game Jam.
The Global Game Jam is a worldwide weekend hackathon, where people of all skill levels come together to create a game based around a single theme. Though the event was not strictly about making video games, and we encouraged non-technical people to participate, we specifically set about recruiting technical talent in hopes of building the community while doing something fun. Our first event was in 2013.
In 2016, Peter was in crunch mode at his day job and didn’t think he was going to have time to organize the event like he usually did. I’d also been unsatisfied with marketing and turnout in previous years, so I decided to take things into my own hands and see if I could get the turnout and skill set required to get at least one finished video game.
Unlike previous years, I started recruiting and organizing a month early. I took the time to identify stakeholders and networks with relevant skill sets, and then made pitches and marketing materials to specifically get those communities interested. The communities included both ACMs at UH Manoa (Association for Computing Machinery and Academy for Creative Media), HI Capacity, DevLeague, and other smaller groups.
One of the challenges that arose is that there was a dispute over location, and a group threatened to split off and do their own game jam. The entire point of the event for me had been to bring the various communities together, so I quickly pivoted to accomodate the concerns and successfully managed to re-merge both events, and learned a valuable lesson about ensuring different communities are onboard with the plan and to be more open about the planning process so that disputes don’t arise late in the game.
The event was ultimately extremely successful. Where prevous years had less than 20 mostly non-technical jammers and no completed projects, the 2016 Game Jam ultimately had over 58 jammers from a variety of technical disciplines (including some hardware hackers!) and 12 reasonably complete games.
Going forward, we’ll continue to implement the strategies I established earlier this year and work on improving outreach even more, hopefully growing the network of multidisciplinary collaborators and encouraging projects outside the jam, all of which help Hawaii’s tech community grow.
To see the games and jammers, please see the Global Game Jam 2016 page.