This weekend, there is a 48 hour Game Jam in honor of Keegan Long-Wheeler. As most of you know, Keegan had to have brain surgery a couple of weeks ago to remove a tumor. In order to cheer him up, we wanted to encourage his friends to build games about Keegan, friendship, dealing with illness, or whatever else came to mind.
The Game Jam is a 48-hour window to build a game in Twine and post it to the site (by midnight on Sunday). There is a community forum to chat, ask for help, or share ideas. I would also like to see if we can find a time to meetup online next week to play games and talk.
Keegan and I have been teaching Twine as a game building platform for the last couple of years. We like Twine, because it’s very easy to pick up allowing us to focus our attention on creating interesting choose your own adventure stories. We built an open faculty development program called eXperiencePlay.education to teach faculty about storytelling in the classroom. The hope with this program is that even if faculty don’t embrace game play or gamification of their courses, they’ll rethink the narrative and student choice within the course. If you haven’t made a game before, I’d suggest going to the site and looking through the material there to help you think about game design and storytelling.
After, we got started with building games, Keegan got in touch with Dan Cox. Dan is one of the leading figures in the Twine community having built numerous Twine tutorials and the Twine cookbook. Thanks to Dan, several of Keegan’s projects and tutorials have now been incorporated into the Twinery’s guides. When I wanted to set up a game jam for Keegan, I reached out to Dan and he put together this site on itch.io, guidelines for the Game Jam, and a set of resources to help everyone out.
So, if you’re a friend of Keegan (if you know me, you probably know and are a friend of Keegan), I hope you’ll join us for our game jam.
