Bristol is a wonderful place for digital creatives – it’s a bit of a surprise that the games development scene seems over the last few years to have quietened down a bit.

But that doesn’t mean it needs to stay quiet.

To stimulate the scene (and have some fun) a bunch of Bristol game developers, sound and graphics designers got together to stage the Bristol Game Jam event.  Held at Pervasive Media Studio, organised by Red Wasp Design with a few helping hands, and in cooperation with the ExPlay festival, a bunch of us got together to build a game in 24 hours.

Except that we got together on Friday night, whereupon we were given the theme for the games (Mirror) and then decided that food and beer was the way to generate some interesting ideas.  That ended at about midnight for most of us, and there were a few sore heads on Saturday morning.  The time limit was 7pm Saturday evening, so in effect we had 7 hours to put together a working game.

Amazingly all four groups achieved this, and by the end of the day there were five playable games.  Granted, none were going to win any awards (although given more time who knows) it was very inspiring for everyone involved, I think a lot of relationships were formed and there was a general buzz about the day which everyone took out with them on Saturday night.

Our team put together a very simple game based upon Jason (of the Argonauts) trying to reflect Medusa’s gaze back before being hit himself:

Our team included Jae (DJ Task) and myself programming, Tessa providing the visuals and 3d models (you don’t want to know what it looked like before the visuals) and Dave (founder of Echoic Audio) producing the audio which really made the game.  Dave has put a far better post up here to describe the day.

Great fun, and hopefully the start of many more Game Jams and the opening up of the game scene in Bristol.

Source code on GitHub.