GroupForming

The participants at the gamejam most likely don't know each other, haven't gotten any ideas to work on and nobody to do it with. To adress these issues, you can do 3 types of exercises with them: socializing exercises, pitching exercises & groupforming exercises.

If your gamejam is small (less then 30 participants), you might not have to do these exercises; normal social mingling and talk can take care of it. Just be sure to that all ends up in a group (unless they want to work on their own, - lone wolfs are acccepted).

If your gamejam is big (150+ participants), we (the NGJ-organizers) have developed a speeddating- method for doing this for NGJ'10. It's not fieldtested yet, but if you want to check it out or maybe even try it, mail us at ngjigda [dot] dk.

Else just do the process below.

Social Exercices

The social exercise is purely to get everyone talking to each other. We've done this exercise the last for years at NGJ and it works fine.

Get everybody out on the floor of a big room.

Tell people to separate into groups based on (in turn) the following criteria:
Field of expertise - gamedesigner, programmer, graphics artist, audio designer, other
Profession - student, hobby gamedeveloper, industry gamedeveloper, indie developer, other
Favorite game - platformer, shooter, roleplaying, strategy, other

Now tell all the groups to discuss what they think the other groups think about their group. Give them 2 minutes to talk among themselves and then ask a representative for each group to tell what they came up with.

Examples:

and so on...

This will bring out some interesting prejudices about people's perception of others people's perception on them (phew!) and should get communication going between people. Remember to moderate it so the tone doesn't get hostile. It will also help create a community-feeling in the groups ("US programmers")and give everybody an overview of the skills & experience of the participants.

Pitching

The purpose of the pitching process is to form groups around gameconcepts that they want to work on. You need a room with wallspace, paper, pens & tape to hang the paper up with.

Ask people to come up with gameconcepts that they want to make. They can either do this in groups or individually. If you have a lot of participants (100+), have people do this in groups of 2-4 people, - this gives fewer concepts at the pitching afterwards.

People take turns to present their gameconcept to all of the participants. They need to specify the following on the paper/in their presentation:

After they've presented the game, they hang the papir on the wall. It's a good idea to timebox the presentations; - give them exactly 30 seconds to do it.

Here is a photo of what this might look like from NGJ 06: http://www.nordicgamejam.org/06/report01.html

Groupforming (round one)

After all ideas are pitched, the “owner” of each idea takes their idea and attaches it to themselves. At this point, idea owners are trying to sell their ideas while other participants are shopping around for an idea they’d like to attach themselves to. For idea owners who are unable to sell their ideas, they will have to give up on their idea and join someone else’s group. This continues until everyone has a group – no one may start until everyone is part of a group (barring Lone Wolfs).

Incidentally, this tactic of keeping everyone “locked in a room” works well for getting people organized, so you don’t usually have to worry about people not finding a group.

Also, groups should pay attention to skill sets, to make sure that they have all the skills they need (generally at least one person with programming skills, one with art skills, one with game design skills, and preferably someone among them who knows how to do audio).

Groupforming (round two)

The purpose of the second round is to get everyone into groups. You need to match groupless participants with missing skills in the groups.

While the participants are gathered, ask the crowd if anyone needs a group and what their skills are. Ask the groups what skills they need. Assign the groupless participants to a group.

Remember: even if a person doesn't initially seem to have the skills for a group, something will most likely pop up that the person can do - QA, groupregistration at the GGJ-site, maintain a design documents, fetching coffee, being project manager etc.

...and now you just send people off their rooms to start developing. Happy trails!