Highlights
- Registration is open through Oct. 3
- Last year’s event broke a Guinness World Record for “Most Participants in a Game Jam”
- Electronic Arts and Insomniac Games are among the sponsors for this year’s event
- Prizes include licenses for high-powered, professional-grade gaming software
Student video game designers will create electronic games from scratch in Chillennium 2018, a giant, Texas A&M student-run game jam competition Oct. 12-14, 2018 in the university’s Memorial Student Center.
Registration, open through Oct. 3, is available at the event’s website.
The annual extravaganza, hosted each year by the Department of Visualization, attracts hundreds of students from across the nation aiming to win coveted game software licenses, develop their digital skills, meet fellow developers, and network with industry professionals who roam the game jam floor advising participants.
Last year’s event, which packed the MSC with 306 game development enthusiasts from 23 schools in the U.S. and Canada, broke a Guinness World Record for “Most Participants in a Game Jam.”
As in years past, participants use their own hardware and software to develop games alone or in teams of up to four members after learning the event’s closely guarded theme during a 4:30 p.m. opening ceremony Friday. Jammers are free to use programming languages available online, loaded on their computers, or provided by contest organizers.
Fueled by contest-provided meals and snacks, and with access to a staffed, onsite rest area, students will race to meet a 4:30 p.m. Sunday deadline to deliver fully developed desktop-based games.
At the contest’s conclusion, industry professionals, event sponsors and game players will play and rank the games in a variety of categories, including innovation, quality, completeness, design and sound. Contest organizers will then award prizes that include highly-sought licenses for high-powered, professional-grade gaming software.
The event is orchestrated by a small group of visualization students headed by André Thomas, who teaches Texas A&M visualization classes in game development and leads the department’s LIVE (Learning Interactive Visualizations Experience) Lab, a university game development hub.
Some of the world’s top video game development and software companies, including Electronic Arts and Insomniac Games, are sponsoring this year’s event. Additional sponsors are listed on the Chillennium website.
Chillennium’s success has enhanced the national prominence of the game design program at Texas A&M’s Department of Visualization.
In 2018 game design school rankings published by Animation Career Review, an online career resource for aspiring animators, game designers and digital artists, Texas A&M landed in the No. 7 spot among public schools and colleges and No. 21 among public and private programs nationally.
This article by Richard Nira originally appeared in ArchOne.
