Big Team Game Jams

Abstract

Game jams have grown as a democratized game development process, imitating on several days the production of the AAA-industry. However, the current format of the mainstream game jams does not give the possibilities to learn how to work in a big production or to emulate correctly the feeling to be in a big team, because the team size tend to oscillate between a solo team to maximum ten participants. In countries like Switzerland, there is no AAA-industry that employs hundreds of developers at the same time. For those kinds of experience, game developers and game designers have to export themselves out of those countries, making it a harder experience to live.In 2015, the two main game developers' linguistic communities of Switzerland tried two different experiments answering this question: How can we bring together the different talents at disposal to create one game?. The Swiss-French game developers' community answered with an indie game jam with a team of 26 developers, the I3 Game Jam. The Swiss-German game developers' community answered with an academic workshop of three weeks with a pre-defined game concept, the Swiss Mercenaries Workshop.From those two approaches, the authors formalize and theorize what is a Big Team Game Jam and their different key elements compared to standard game jams: Target Group, Hierarchy, Participants Motivation, Ownership, and Duration. This paper explores those two solutions, their community context, and gives a framework for countries like Switzerland without a AAA-industry to emulate those productions at very low-cost.