A Great Ham Jam
The first ever Great Ham Jam (@thegreathamjam) took place this weekend at McMaster Innovation Park. The hackathon saw over 70 attendees spend a weekend developing video games (and in one case, a board game).
The event drew attendees from across Southern Ontario, with groups of people coming in from K-W, Niagara and the GTA. The projects were judged by regional indie gaming studio leaders Ericka Evans of Phantom Compass and Alex Golebiowski of PixelNAUTS.
The hackathon was a spin-off of the monthly @GameDevDrinks events that Bret Measor has led up. The GameDevDrinks have been notable for their solid, no-BS educational content, continually rising attendance and great vibe. Just like GameDevDrinks, this hackathon had a positive, fun, inclusive and collaborative vibe.
Before closing down, Silicon Knights was really the big video game industry player in the Hamilton-Niagara region. Silicon Knights was born in the era of shrink wrap CD and cartridge video games for consoles and PCs, when multiplayer meant a 2-player Nintendo game.
Since then the video game industry has been upended by social, mobile and console downloadable games (e.g. Xbox Games Store). These shifts have made indie video game studios made up of only a few people viable.
In the wake of Silicon Knights’ collapse, there’s been some upstart indie gaming firms founded by ex-SK employees. Given the major changes in the video game industry, it’s possible for an indie video game industry phoenix to rise from the ashes of Silicon Knights.
As much as governments can create grants, programs, incubators and other supports for the gaming space, it’s really up to content creators to create great, compelling games that people want to play. Perhaps more so than other areas of tech, video games are a creative and collaborative product too.
That’s really why hackathons like this are so important, as they put the right people in a room for those creative embers to come together and turn into a bonfire.
This was an excellent event and very important for the future of an indie gaming community in the region. I hope that The Great Ham Jam is back in 2017, bigger and better!
You can find some of the games created at The Great Ham Jam on itch.io by searching for ‘great ham jam’ (more should be added as time goes on), and you can listen to the winning team announcements in the video below!
