Chris Delay’s Game Jam Indoctrination
June 14, 2010
by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne
After some apprehension, Chris Delay, the head of Darwina studio Introversion, took part in the June TigJAM UK meet-up. Apparently over the past year a large community of indie game developers has sprung up around Cambridge, which encouraged Delay to take part. Ultimately he designed three games for the jam, each based on a vague theme drawn out of a proverbial hat. As he describes the process:
Everyone writes down a theme on a piece of paper, and two or three themes are then chosen at random. Themes can be anything and are often ridiculous, like “Staying Awake” or “Antidepressants”. You have three hours to make a game that explores that theme in some way. You can use whatever tech you want, and I saw quite a mixture of styles. I used our internal c++ library “SystemIV” – which is at the core of every game we’ve made since Defcon.
His topics were “White Holes”, “Sega Dreamcast VMU”, and “Mouse input only”. Out of those three themes Delay created the particle graphics demo White Holes (“Style over substance really, a common criticism of Introversion projects 
”); the Ed-Logg-does-Pac-Man action game Trapper; and probably the most interesting of the bunch, the plate-spinning art game Balancing Act.
In Balancing Act, you spin plates that represent personal values such as family and friends; wealth and success. As the game progresses, it becomes impossible to balance everything so you have to start picking and choosing the plates that most matter to you.
A bit facile, but a clever use of a few hours. You can read Delay’s full account here
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