Five years ago, a group of enthusiasts, going by the name of MAGDA, came up with a crazy ambitious plan. To join a global event and round up Macedonians to take part in creating video games for 48 hours.
After the two days spent on designing, producing, programming and lord knows what else, the public could feast their eyes on the first 30 games… The rewards from the first Game Jam went for Love Notebook (Bitola) and Odium (Skopje).
Fast forward five years…
MAGDA organized the fifth Global Game Jam Macedonia. This time, the participants themselves started asking around about the event since November. For the first time ever, the event in Skopje was graced with a co-organizer (Shadowgrid). And 48 hours after that:
“This year’s Global Game Jam Macedonia had 150 participants, all being part of 26 teams and contributing towards the development of 24 games.
The event in Skopje had almost 300 visitors, with some increase in number during the presentations. With 200 visitors, Bitola came quite close. For the first time, we even had a team from Ljubljana and they had the opportunity to shine in Bitola. We gave 9 interviews for the media, two interviews were on the radio and we were also guests in front of the big screens, on five occasions.
700 sandwiches, 200 bureks and 50 pizzas were gulped down during the marathon. As for the chocolates, well, we lost count of that, but we did try to get ourselves drunk with 700 liters of soda, and 500 liters of water. In addition, we burnt through 1.4 TB bandwidth and 1711.2 meters’ toilet paper.
We also had two Oculus Rift stands and even managed to allow visitors (25 beta testers) to get their hands on the first AAA game from Macedonia, Sonder, by KAMAi. Playing board and card games was also a common occurrence. During the event, we employed 30 people, not excluding the volunteers. There were even snowball fights but no one got hurt.” – says Gorast Cvetkovski, a representative from MAGDA.
You can find all of the games which were developed in Bitola and Skopje on their respective web sites: Skopje and Bitola.
Rewards for best games developed in Skopje went for:
- Wave master by Crosbow Bats;
- Wave boiz by Dark1;
- Waves on the way by Team T19.
Bitola:
- Soundstomper by ThunderByte Games;
- Codename: Farewell by Return Zero;
- Golden–wave by SuperCreeperGirl.
The game Hullarog snagged a special reward from Shadowgrid. Sadly, this reward was only for the participants in Skopje.
See you on Global Jam Macedonia 2018!
