During the last weekend the International Game Developers Association promoted the Fukushima Game Jam, which was held in Minami Soma City. The idea was that gathered game developers form teams and develop games in a 30 hour period. From scratch.

Even though I couldn’t join, I took this event to also start up some game development. I did some studying and small example and test programs before to get some skill and knowledge about the topic and of course I am developing various kinds of software for quite a while now. But game development certainly is a different territory than say, writing a shell script or an business application.

Developing a game asks for a different type of creativity and for knowledge in several areas of expertise. There is the need of some amount of understanding of OpenGL to avoid wasting precious CPU cycles and memory pages by using strange sizes for the sprite textures for example. Memory management is always a hot topic, especially when developing for mobile devices. You don’t want to miss out on giving back some used memory just that your game crashes just because your hero fired too many shots. Actually you shouldn’t even create your in-game objects every time you need them but try to go eco: Reuse the objects that you need in your game.

All in all it was a very educational time kicking off some new project in a new territory while joining the Game Jam in spirit. The resulting games of the Fukushima Game Jam can be found at http://fgj11.ecloud.nii.ac.jp/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start.

I hope there will be another Game Jam chapter here in Japan and I hope that time I will be able to join.