Whew, what a weekend! This last weekend I and three other classmates participated in the 2009 Bay Area Game Jam hosted by Microsoft and Wild Pockets (check their site and forum for more info) under the group name Pure Code (because we are all programmers, no artists or designers among us). The premise is that all competitors get there early on saturday and have 24 hours to make a game using the Wild Pockets engine and scripts written in the Lua language. Now note that none of us have used either before so we didn't have a clue what we were doing. In fact we don't even get to programming using engines, AI, engine building, or anything actually resembling a non text based game for another semester or two. Sadly we didn't place, but we didn't really expect to. Upon arriving we found out that half the competitors were actually from game companies. I was no biggie, we didn't go to win, we went to have fun and get some experience, and we did lots of both. In fact as we were preparing to leave the team who placed first came up to us to congratulate us on our game. It was absolutely fantastic. They had two live bands (the two listed under Listening to), tons of free food, and there are few things like taking a break and playing xbox at Microsoft. It was a really rewarding experience and I can't wait for next year. I'm pretty sure that Wild Pockets will soon host pics and possibly some vids from the event. I know they streamed some online but I'm not sure if they kept em up. Anyway, check out the games that were submitted, there were some real gems in there.