from Gameheads

Oakland Video Game Fest at Kapor Center

We were invited to be a mentor and judge at the 1st Annual Oakland Video Game Fest, which was organized by the Gameheads youth program and took place at the Kapor Center for Social Impact.

The weekend included a game jam where 18 students worked tirelessly to design and create playable video games around the theme of ‘2040’. The winning game, ‘The Greatest Political Race of All Time’ managed to fit in an innovative core loop that drove interesting player dynamics and spoke directly to the issues the team chose to pursue with their game design.

Game jams can be a lot of pressure as it is difficult to make anything playable, much less enjoyable, in 48 hours. But game jams teach some important skills like team building, empathy, rapid prototyping, and perhaps most importantly, completingĀ a project. In the end, your team is responsible for finishing something to show off.

Perfect is not possible or even preferred. But the time constraints drive towards experimentation and rule breaking. Which is great especially for younger developers.

Well done to all the team, and kudos to Hope Lehman and the rest of the Gameheads team.

-Chris

That way, five impossible seconds will turn into a couple of very real minutes. And don’t tell me you can’t make a girl fall in love with you in those two minutes rubratings chicago. This method is very popular in movies. Really, the audience is much more interesting to watch as the hero falls into a puddle, walks on the street in his arms, smashing a storefront window or doing somersaults on the spot.