International Festival of Computer Games Development Held at SUSU

Last weekend, Global Game Jam international festival of computer games development took place at SUSU. Participants had to create a game on a given topic, which is revealed only at the beginning of the Jam, within 48 hours.

“This is the 5th year we’ve been holding Global Game Jam. This is the event where students try themselves in GameDev, which means they write games in extremely short time. Writing a game within 48 hours is a real challenge. But participants have always demonstrated good results and created worthy games which could be further developed and sold,” said Maksim Tuprikov, GGJ coordinator at SUSU.

The event is held simultaneously at 800 platforms in 109 countries of the world. In Chelyabinsk, the main organizer of the Jam is SUSU’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“This is an incredible event which has been inspiring Chelyabinsk’s community of programmers for the fifth year; not only computer games developers but also software developers who for a weekend can put aside their routine business applications and do something really interesting,” noted Gleb Radchenko, Director of the SUSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

During the previous 4 Jams, 68 games have been created. This year, 23 more games joined the list. This year GGJ’s topic was intermission. Each team of developers had their own approach to implementing this concept.

“The Jam’s topic, as usual, is quite abstract,” noted Ruslan Vovchenko, one of the Festical’s participants.“You can relate it with anything, but it helps determining direction of a game. For example, our game is about a blind monk who is trying to find the way out of a labyrinth by following a ray of light. Our goal is to transmit this light to him and lead him to the exit.”

Not only programmers take part in Jams. Artists, screenwriters and even musicians can also join the competition.

“We created a game about infection. A gamer starts as an infected character and his goal is to contaminate other people. We made it just by three of us, our team had a programmer, a designer and a game designer,” said Andrey Filatov, a GGJ participant.

All participants of the Festival received certificates of participation in Global Game Jam – 2018, and the best games were awarded with diplomas and sponsor prizes.

You can review the games created at the Jam here.