Iowa Indie Game Jam 2007

This weekend was the first Iowa Indie Game Jam, and it was a great success. Its beginnings were humble and spontaneous. Andres came down to Des Moines to see the coolness that is going on here - this weekend it was The Grey Market. While visiting, he proposed having a game development jam session. I thought it was a great idea. So, since he didn't have his laptop and my apartment was about 85 degrees, we decided to head up to Ames to his parents' place.

Our original goal was to make an asteroids clone that created background graphics after you destroyed asteroids with a continuous laser that could reflect off of other asteroids. And it was going to be done in ActionScript 3.0. Well, we soon found out how different AS 3.0 is from 2.0, so we sent out an S.O.S. to Mike B. to save our butts.

(from top-left clockwise: Josh L "torncanvas", Mike B "fucrate", Andres R "monkeyscience")

To our surprise, Mike H. showed up on his way out of town to visit some friends. He ended up staying the whole time.

(from left: Mike H, Mike B "fucrate")

Thankfully he had a camera to document the event. Soon after, Mike B. arrived and proposed creating a 50-lines-or-less Flash game, inspired by a recent competition on the Kongregate forums. After some discussion, we decided to make a dungeon crawler with this restriction. That proved to be quite the challenge...

Everyone got pretty sucked in, which was great, and eventually we worked into the wee hours of Saturday night. The aftermath:

We had breakfast together the next morning and came back to work on more of the game. Pretty soon Greg showed up to join in the fun, too.

(Greg W "aeiowu")

Not long after, I had to leave, but the IIGJ continued as everyone worked in true indie fashion on an old school favorite: the dungeon crawler.

There's already talk of the next Iowa Indie Game Jam. Rock on, independent game development.