Fun times here at the Global Game Jam at Carnegie-Mellon University: Part 2

Well, unfortunately, things did not go well for windows phone at the Global Game Jam at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburg. Many of the teams developed flash-based games, even though flash requires you to be a null nazi for much, if not most, of the time due to horrible garbage collection. Another issue I noticed that many of the teams decided to use the Unity engine for their games, and there is no port of Unity for Windows Phone.

Play testing for the teams went well. There was no one perfect game that any team there came up with. Some projects went more well than others. When I went to playtest on Sunday, some of the teams were not ready for testing, trying to work out some last minute details.

As I said before, things did not go well for windows phone here. Only one team made an xna game (for pc), with intent to make a windows phone version, but time ran out for the windows phone version. Another team used Microsoft's Kinect SDK to make a game incorporating kinect, but hopes for a windows phone version of the game died when the team found out that there is not any kinect programming support for Windows Phone yet. Another issue was lack of knowledge of C#, the (main) programming language behind windows phone. If you know Java or C++, C# is easy to learn, but I guess the teams felt stretched for time and didn't feel like they had time to learn this.

I will be uploading some pictures of the event I took later (and post the link here).