Inspiration - Game Jam Videos

The IGJ was the first recorded “official” game jam as we know them today. It was an event for indie game developers that allowed them to develop and present ideas without publisher restrictions. Hosted in Oakland, California just before the Game Developers Conference, the IGJ ran on sponsorship and donations.

Fast forward to today there are literally 100’s of Game Jams every year with sites like itch.io leading the way as a hosting platform. What’s great about Game Jams is the time constraints forcing everyone who enters to have their games submitted by a certain time and date.

With everybody following the same theme as set by the organiser, Game jams have been adopted by many of the big Hyper Casual publishers as a way of attracting developers to them. Often with large cash incentives ( usually around $150k ) and a chance at a lucrative publishing deal it makes sense for both parties.

So why are Game Jams a great resource of inspiration?

For 99% of entries the games are super rough round the edges, but if you look closely, sometimes you’ll find some hidden gems of ideas.

With that said, since the Hyper Casual Publishers have turned these more into competitions with all entries usually being tested for CTR or CPI, these new “Game Jams” are not so useful, but for the traditional Desktop / Steam Game Jams, you can still unnearth some intersting concepts and those developers are most likely to discard entirely.

There’s know quick way to do this so expect to what some janky games, but it’s common place these days that the organisers put together a handy round up video like the ones listed below.

Below are the roundups from probably the biggest Game Jams around, GMTK and Brackeys ( R.I.P ).