On June the 19th and July the 7th, the MAGELLAN Game Jams took place respectively in London and in Athens. The goal of these events was to challenge users to create their own game, after a short training about game design mechanics and MAT usage.
The attendees were essentially designers and students without any or few knowledge in programming. Despite the amount of information they had to assimilate in a short time, the quality and the complexity of their game were pretty impressive. They succeeded in smoothly integrating in their scenario the following concepts:
- location based conditions
- activities
- asset management
- items
- roles
- logics
- multi-players aspects
- ...
In the end, their feedbacks were quite good. The MAT approach, in terms of visual programming, clear distinction between activities, actions and conditions, was very helpful to make them understand the necessary logics to create a game. The only frustration came from the time passing too quickly, which unfortunately prevented them from introducing more advanced features like an event base scenario. In sum, the game jams were a success and confirmed that the project takes the right direction.
