As the site organisers around the world hang up the keys to the doors of their jam sites for another year, the collectors have come to take away a record number of pizza boxes into the recycling, and hopefully everyone has had a chance to get some well-deserved rest, it means yet another Global Game Jam® weekend is now over!
For our 12th year, we had over 48,700 jammers attending 934 jam sites across the world in 118 countries, all coming together to make… our biggest jam ever!! Once again we have broken all of last year's records and become the newly-crowned Biggest Game Jam Ever!
We had 9 new countries take part for the first time ever: Albania, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cyprus, Mauritius, Senegal, Sudan and Zimbabwe, adding 213 jammers and 35 new games to the mix. One of GGJ's biggest aims is to be able to bring new emerging voices and talent into the game making space, and so we are delighted to welcome these new site organisers and jammers to our big jam family.
Artists, musicians, coders, designers, writers, producers, hobbyists, students and more, from diverse corners of the world, spent a hectic weekend creating games inspired by our wonderful keynote speakers: Chris Avellone and the team at Take This, the multifaceted theme of 'Repair’, and the extra dimension of our 2020 diversifiers.
We will be spending the next few weeks playing your games, collecting together your photos and stories (and putting them up on Facebook), and reading and reviewing your feedback from the jammer survey (which if you have not filled in yet, make sure you do so we can get your views, and make GGJ even better next year!).
Miss your jammer buddies already? Don't forget you can join up to our Discord server, where we can carry on the conversation.
Finally, enormous thanks are due to everyone involved in the event: our fantastic dedicated volunteers (the executive committee, the regional organisers and the theme committee), our site organisers who put their heart and soul into the weekend, and the sponsors who help keep the lights on. Also big shout out to our Technology Manager Zain, who managed the near impossible job of making the website run smoothly over the weekend!
This wonderful event simply wouldn't exist without all of you talented, hard-working, enthusiastic and skillful people spending a huge chunk of your free time making games. You are all amazing, and we appreciate every last one of you, and hope to see you again at #GGJ21, running from Friday 29 to Sunday 31 January 2021!
If you are still reading this post - good job! Maybe consider donating to our current fundraiser, with the aim of kickstarting our new website project.