STORY AND PHOTOS BY GIOVAN SANTIAGO
When Julia Galimidi attends a game jam, she never really knows how it is going to go.
It’s usually a challenge to even determine what project to pursue.
However, she says things usually are at least kind of fun.
“You never know what is going to come out,” she said. “Sometimes things break last second and it can be really stressful but we had a really good time.”
Galimidi was on the winning team at the All Hallows Jam, a hackathon held at the Tech Hub Orlando offices downtown last weekend.
Attendees had 48 hours to develop a spooky horror video game within a building that about 100 years ago was both a funeral home and crematorium.
The event was the second of its kind, following its debut last year.
Indienomicon regularly hosts themed game jams with All Hallows Jam one of the events that more squarely focuses on themed entertainment.
It’s an opportunity for creatives to flex their creativity.
“We had seen that there was always a lot of demand for a horror-themed game jam,” said Matt Thompson, one of the event organizers whose studio has been working on its own video game.
Thompson said the ultimate win would be a sponsorship or support from the theme park industry in Orlando.
Indienomicon is an independent video game group that has been around for about 10 years.
The group launched their series of game jams to little fanfare shortly after launch but the events have grown in popularity as they have been held on a more regular basis.
The grand prize for this weekend’s game were tickets to Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights, an example of what helps Central Florida stand apart.
Most of the developers at the jam were local to Orlando, while others come from the coast or even out of state.
Orange County Library’s Juan Rivera, who serves as senior digital media design instructor for the library’s Melrose Center, said the game jam has become a regular must-attend event for him.
“I come here to network and meet people,” he said. “It’s just a fun thing to do on a weekend.”
Galimidi’s team included a handful of veterans of Orlando’s tech community and game jams.
Rivera and Galimidi were joined by Caris Baker and Brian Stabile, the brains behind Central Florida’s most-recent arcade game success “Jai Alai Heroes.” Narrative design and audio was done by C.J. Baker.
“Inhuman Resources” reflected the everyday boredom of working at a corporation. One challenge in a 48-hour event is choosing what stays in the final product and what is cut.
“It’s really easy to get super excited and want to do a lot of different things,” Galimidi said. “But at the end of the day, you have to narrow down what is the most important part of your game and really stick to that and polish that because a smaller polished game is typically better than a larger and messier game.”
All games built at the All Hallows Jam can be played at the event’s ITCH.IO page.