Game Jam Brings Together Art, Computer Science, Design Students

Broken droids, space rodents and unethical relationship therapists have one thing in common — they're all protagonists in video games developed at the NJIT edition of the annual Global Game Jam earlier in February.

As in a musical jam, the purpose of this event is to improve technical skills and create something just for fun. It's not a competition, explained Ethan Lupinski, a senior information technology major in the Ying Wu College of Computing. He organized the event along with students from NJIT chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery along with the ACM SIGGRAPH (special-interest group for graphics) and the International Game Developers Association.

This year's theme was repair, so most people made games around the concept of fixing things. Lupinski said the event is open to everyone including non-NJIT students and people who aren't students at all. There were 14 teams created by 82 participants, with about half of them being from NJIT. Several alumni also took part  and there was one student from Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

Lupinski said the event taught him valuable project management skills. He had little time to work on his own team's project, which was a game called Percussive Repairs, in which mechanics hit robots until they work better or break. Instead, he spent time trying to help other teams avoid feature creep — a scourge of high-tech industries, where engineers are addicted to adding more features rather than fixing the ones they already made — and get something finished in the allotted 48 hours. Ahead of the event, he scrambled to reserve space in the Guttenberg Information Technology Center after their original location plans didn't work out — it was a lesson in that being a game developer isn't all fun. "I was technically a site organizer. It was a little bit of a doozy," he joked.

But it was also a lesson in not leaving projects unfinished. Lupinski said his team was mostly composed of NJIT alumni. They are currently working on adding finishing touches to the game in their spare time. The program is written in Microsoft's C# language and connects to Javascript libraries so players can compete remotely through smartphones. When finished, they'll probably open-source it.

Another jammer, sophomore Rhea Adur, helped develop a game called The Lost Project. Adur is a sophomore digital design major in Hillier College of Architecture and Design. She explained that the game is a meta-joke where players have to finish developing a game, because her team didn't.

More people participated last year, but the quality of work was better this year, Lupinski said. "Even though we had less games this time, most of them worked," he said. "That's what we were happy to see. Everyone did a good job."