The Indie Game Jam, a four-day game development binge that lures game developers from around the country, takes place this weekend in Oakland, CA. The event, now in its third year, bills itself as a "weekend of intense creativity" in which professional game developers from major studios like Ion Storm, Maxis, and Oddworld Inhabitants make dozens of games based on the same custom game engine.
Started three years ago by a group of developers (including Chris Hecker, Doug Church, Sean Barrett, Thatcher Ulrich, and others) who wanted to encourage experimentation and innovation in commercial games, the Jam participants often work through the nights of the contest to complete their games.
The completed games will be shown at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the Game Developers Conference next week in San Jose, California and online at
www.indiegamejam.com. All code created by the entrants is released on SourceForge under the GNU General Public License, so other developers can freely experiment with the engine source code and games. The event is sponsored by Intel, RAD Game Tools and the Independent Games Festival.
The GDC and the Independent Games Festival are produced by the CMP Game Group, which also produce this site.
