Colorado Lottery GameJam - Yaprak DeCarmine, Co-founder & CEO of GameJolt

so yaprock is the um co-founder of gamejolt so the platform that we're using for our our game jam game jolt is actually got some colorado roots and she's going to talk a little bit about um gamejolt itself uh why she's partnering and supporting the game jam for the colorado lottery and then a little bit about colorado and how she feels about that so you proc with that i'm going to turn the time to you thank you so much for having me and putting this awesome event together i used to live in colorado actually the goal was to just move there for about six months to enjoy the mountains and i ended up staying for years so pretty sad when i had to leave but my name is yap rapta carmine i'm the co-founder and ceo of gamejolt gamejolt is a platform for people to build and join meaningful communities around video games we have built angel to help independent creators grow audiences around their games while developing their games so that when they're ready to launch or you know announce their kickstarter campaigns they actually have people to announce to so as of today we've had over 140 million people find their way onto our platform to play follow and talk about games we have over 130 000 playable games made by individual people like you and as well as studios with you know millions of dollars in revenue so i'm happy to help out with the game jam this year uh thank you for letting us be a part of the opening ceremony as well this is super exciting um but yeah i'm here to talk about game jam so let's get started uh through gamejolt we've hosted hundreds if not thousands of jams to date i've run some of the biggest jams in the world with the biggest influencers in the world um so if you're new to the world of game jams i'd like to welcome you and give you a brief explanation of what they are so a game jam is an event where participants gather online or pre-covet physically to make games in a limited period of time sometimes this can be 48 hours a few days a week and i've even seen jams lasting a whole month a lot of jams are built around a particular theme that is revealed at the start of the event so in our case the theme is monitor games you can join a game jam by yourself or you can find artists programmers audio people as teammates and communities like angel and discord so we do have a community set up on being built for this jam so be sure to check in to find teammates there or um you know you can also use the discord as well so it sounds like that's also set up um but yeah game jams are a lot of fun because they allow people to experiment with different engines game mechanics and artistic styles many games actually start out as concepts and jams and then continue development for a full release years later and you know sometimes developers just need a break from the massive game they're working on and instead work on something new right so they might want to try a new language or engine so creating a short game is the perfect outlet for experimenting and learning something new as for participation tips in a jam um i would advise you to just come up with a small enough idea or concept for a game that you can actually finish within the window of time that you're given right so jams are not the place to make that dream game you've always wanted to make that game rules that it will take you years to develop so instead you know come up with something fun that fits well within the theme of the jam um another tip is to keep your team sizes reasonable and spend enough time planning out your game and assigning roles so find a great medium for real-time communication like discord or slack that everyone on your team has access to you can share your progress on your gamejolt page as well as twitter our users love images and videos um you can run polls and get feedback from real gamers as you're actually you know working on the game which is kind of fun um and then when you're ready you know to upload the game make sure you give yourself enough time right um give yourself enough time to upload the game but also to play test it as well and um i guess my last piece of advice is you know remember that game jams are a social event so be sure to connect with the organizers but also other participants so look at this as like a great way to you know network and find people that you can actually work with and maybe you'll work with them you know down the road on a commercial game as well so um as a founder i'm very grateful for the meaningful relationships and connections i've made in the games communities in colorado so there's some really great people there i know zee serenity forge is here he heads up like some of the um you know best community slacks and um igda groups so definitely get involved in those they've led me to partnerships for game jolts speaking gigs at events and you know some of my best friends so i can't think of a better state honestly to be the next big thing in gaming and tech and colorado and i can't wait to move back thank you your practice fabulous insight and and great wisdom i mean if anybody knows about game jams it's you so thank you for your contributions and your support and all of your insights we really do appreciate it