Back in April, Purdue Hackers hosted Kiln, a micro game jam, that saw 18 participants spread across seven teams create micro video games in under 48 hours. Wacom is passionate about supporting emerging creativity, so we sponsored the jam by providing a Wacom Intuos Pro creative pen tablet to each member of the winning team!
What is Purdue Hackers? What is a Game Jam?
Purdue Hackers is a student organization of tech enthusiasts at Purdue University, intended as a “radically kind, inclusive, and weirdo creative people who learn new things & ship projects together.” Those projects usually involve coding but might end up as design projects, software, or — in the case of the game jam — video games.
A game jam is an event that brings together game design enthusiasts to meet peers and collaborate to create a video game during an extremely constrained time period, usually with a unifying theme. The Global Game Jam routinely brings together thousands of participants to its events, but smaller jams happen across the world all the time — including micro-jams like Kiln.
How was the jam?
18 creators took part in the Kiln micro-jam, forming seven teams – all united to create a complete video game in under 48 hours, with the overarching theme of Friendship. A variety of games were created — click here to check them out — but there could be only one winner. It was: Ship Happens!
Ship Happens was a cute game about putting together a group of friends with different traits so that you can … create a boat out of everyone and sail as far as you can? It didn’t necessarily need to make logical sense; it just had to be fun.
Congratulations to the winners! Enjoy your Wacom Intuos Pro creative pen tablets. We hope to see bigger and better games from all participants as you continue working on your game development skills, and hope Wacom can be a part of that creative journey!
