Game Jam Brings Design Skills to Techies, Tech Skills to Designers

Students who study computing teamed with those in digital design from Jan. 29-31 at Global Game Jam, a hackathon for video game development, which was virtual this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

About three dozen entrants spanning five teams completed the challenge to finish a game in 48 hours, with some teams also including alumni and students from other universities, said Julian Quinn, the lead event organizer, who is a junior information technology major in Ying Wu College of Computing.

"It's programming for the fun of it, just showing off what you can make," Quinn explained. "This year's theme was 'lost and found'. It was neat to see our members try to tackle that."

University Lecturer Jessica Ross-Nersesian, who works in Hillier College of Architecture and Design and collaborates with Ying Wu staff, said she admired Quinn and the other organizers for making the normally physical event happen this year in a virtual manner. Beside the hacking, this year's event included a keynote by Global Game Jam executive Tim Cullings, who was an engineer at Facebook's Oculus virtual reality subsidiary. Cullings told participants to surround themselves with good people, foster creativity and use their resources to make the online learning successful. There was also a Twitch session providing jammers with a virtual show-and-tell moment for online spectators.

Ross-Nersesian is hopeful that future jams could let student developers work across universities. Her favorite game was an unfinished submission by Ying Wu alumnus Ethan Lupinski, whose artistic and humorous entry saw its protagonist keep losing pieces of himself.

Quinn said the majority of jammers this year were Ying Wu game development students, but Hillier digital design students stood out for their creative skills, which he said was an eye-opener. "This year I think the design side really impressed me. There were a lot of talented artists introduced through SIGGRAPH and the art club," he noted. They, along with Lupinski who ran last year's event, may have inspired their peers from the computing side — "Even the Ying Wu students were able to make some impressive art," Quinn joked.

Quinn, from the Camden County community of Atco, said his favorite game produced at the event was "Lost and Found" depicting a warehouse clerk trying to keep track of artifacts, evoking the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. His personal favorite commercial game is Luigi's Mansion and he hopes to become a professional game developer. He became involved in the jam after learning about it from his older brother Satchell who is an NJIT alumnus.

Patricia Patalinjug, a sophomore digital design student from Nutley and member of Albert Dorman Honors College, joined the event for the first time this year. She heard about it from NJIT's SIGGRAPH chat room on Discord. "I just knew the general premise, which was to make a video game in 48 hours. I thought that would be a fun way to spend my free weekend, why not try something new? It was really fun," she said. She connected with four programmers to make a game called "Land of Balloons" where the main character searches for his lost balloon, avoiding obstacles, discovering where all of the world's lost balloons wind up and ultimately returning them to their owners.

She was able to see game development from the computing side, the same as Quinn discovered artistic angles. "I learned a lot. I realized what it takes, as a designer, to communicate with the programmers. I realized how little I know about coding and what it's like on their end. It's not really a priority for them to think about what it's going to look like versus how it's going to function," she said. "I encourage everyone to try it out. I think it's a great portfolio-building opportunity. I made friends. No matter your skill set, there's always a place for you. I didn't know where I'd fit it, if at all, and I found my place."

Many participants hope to achieve the success of Nicholas Seccondro, who graduated from the digital design program in 2020 and now works at the Activision Blizzard subsidiary Raven Software. His current assignment is to develop riggings, which is the middleware between virtual models and animators, for the "Call of Duty: Warzone" game.

Seccondro was part of the game jam in 2018 and 2019 as a participant and in 2020 as one of Lupinski's co-organizers. He said he learned about the process of iterating characters, which was crucial to landing his job, and then learned about time management during the organizational aspects. He also credited Hillier adjunct instructor Augustus Wendell who taught the importance of hard work. Now, he said, after seeing a modeler's work, "I can draw on my design sense to create an intuitive rig that the animator can understand."