CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

It would be a stretch to say the LSU students kicking about LSU's Digital Media Center last Friday evening were nervous. Instead, as the sun set and their massive weekend of game development loomed, they seemed kind of impatient. Time to go already.

The students were taking part in the Global Game Jam, a time-limited international game development exercise. The deal: Budding game developers have 48 hours to design and create a game, more or less shoehorning a multi-year process into a matter of hours.

It's exceedingly popular. First held in 2009, last year saw 40,000 people in 108 countries take part, creating 7,600 games in the process. Last weekend was the first time the event had been held at LSU post-pandemic, and the excitement was palpable.

Teams consisted of programmers, who handled the technical side of things, and artists. Among the latter was Nyako Arana, who already had a few ideas up her sleeve — the theme, "Make us laugh," had been released earlier in the week — with a 2D game all fleshed out.

"You can go super meta with it," she said, with a smile. "It's really good for people getting into (game design)."

For Arana, the Game Jam served as a way of indulging her passion for game art while getting an overall look at the gaming process.

"There was already an abundance of programmers," she said. "I love doing art, it's one of my favorite things, and there's pretty much always art within game design. But the (Game Jam) is very, very much a crash course."

Some students were preparing to slog it out, having turned up with sleeping bags in tow, while others (like Arana) were more likely to break up the long hours with short rest trips to their nearby homes.

Staff and some students, who weren't taking part in the event itself, put in shifts throughout the weekend to help. Among them was Marc Aubanel, LSU's Director of Digital Media Arts & Engineering.

Aubanel is something of a legend in gaming circles, having worked on a range of big-time games throughout his 40-odd-year career, including Electronic Arts' game-changing FIFA Soccer series.

"A normal game takes two to five years (to develop)," he said. "It's all very slow — game development can be like watching paint dry."

In other words, the goal isn't to make a new FIFA.

"It's more of a creative challenge and an intellectual puzzle than about making something good," he said. "You don't really know what you're going to have until Sunday. (With the Game Jam) you get to experience all parts."

While there appeared to be little tension, there were a few isolated pockets of concern. Upstairs, in a quiet part of the building, Wahaj Hussain and Zhenjie Yu looked at each other. With five minutes to go before the start time, their team's idea had, somehow, gone out the window. 

"I was feeling a lot better before we discussed our game," Hussain said. "Now it looks like we don't have an idea."

Silence. 

Still, it appears they pulled something out. At the end of the frenetic weekend, Aubanel said all but one of the 10 teams — the exception being a one-person outfit that had evidently vanished — had turned in a completed game. Though quality isn't exactly the end goal, he even noted that one or two of the games were "quite exceptional."

Awards were handed out for best art, best programming, best use of theme, best audio, and game of the show. Yet, true to the event's ethos, Aubanel was hesitant to elevate one particular person or outfit over another.

"It was kind of exhausting to get it going ... but it's nice to be back to normal again, to get it back (at LSU)," he said. "Everyone worked very, very hard."