Game Jam The Movie, An Insight Into Indie Game Development

A Documentary On Indie Game Development

 

Game Jam, a documentary on indie game developers bringing in Clique voice technology into action. Andy Powers Clique Founder CEO, Ram Reddy and CineForge Media worked together to make this happen and get Clique’s technology introduced to the market.

In this short documentary, the audience follows 12 teams of indie game developers through a 48 hr game development competition in which the games were supposed to feature the theme “Let the games be heard” and incorporate Clique voice tech. The game developers were able to make unique and innovative games and considering that they only had two days, the games turned out amazing.

The Competition

The first 28 minutes of the documentary takes place during the competition. In this part of the movie, we get to see what the developers are working on and how they’re doing. The best part about the documentary is the fact that you don’t need to be a professional game developer to find it interesting. I don’t know much about game development but, I still found the documentary very interesting. You get to see the process of game making from the brainstorm sessions to the graphic design. I only wish that we would’ve seen more of the competition but, I understand that they didn’t want the documentary to get too long. The thing is that they could’ve shown a bit of gameplay from each game as it wouldn’t make the documentary too long and, it’d be interesting to see what the indie developers came up with in the short amount of time.

Documentaries about game development usually aren’t easy to understand if or they’re really boring for the average person. The best part about this documentary is the fact that you never get bored as the first part is the competition and the second part is set in IndieCade so, you’d never get bored. There is always something interesting going on so you’ll always have fun.

IndieCade

After 48 hours, the developers finished up their work and every judge played each game once. After all the games were played, the judges chose the winners and sent them to IndieCade. The developers were able to show case their games to PlayStation, Oculus, and Cartoon Network. In this part of the documentary, we get to see more of the games and it’s really interesting to see games going from a simple idea to a full-fledged game in a matter of weeks. Thanks to IndieCade, these Indie devs were able to be discovered by tech giants and one of them were promised Dev Kits from Oculus.

The topic of this review is very interesting and, it’s really good for the gaming industry. Thanks to the guys that made this documentary, indie devs were discovered and they brought innovation to the gaming industry. As I already mentioned, documentaries about game development can get a bit dull but, this documentary manages to be interesting for the whole 52 minutes. Of course, thanks to the use of Clique voice tech, the developers made unique games. For example, one of the games was a sheep Beat ’em up in which you used voice commands to make the sheep do actions such as punching, kicking, jumping, etc. IndieCade brought a bunch of developers together so, they were able to come up with a lot of fun and innovative ideas that have never been seen.

During the competition, some of the games that were shown to us looked like a finished game that you’d be able to pick up from Steam. One of the examples for this is “(Voice) Another World,” a VR game in which you crash land onto a mysterious planet and the players can’t see each other, but players had to communicate using Clique software to finish the objectives.

In conclusion, you should definitely watch the documentary if you’re into gaming and game development. It’s interesting to see the games transform from a simple idea to a full-fledged game. Even though the developers only worked on the games for two days, the games looked amazing and they looked like something that devs have been working on for a very long time. If you are into game development you’ll definitely enjoy this relatively short documentary. The best part out of all of this is the fact that you can watch the whole documentary free of charge from YouTube right now!

IMDB:  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6937570/?ref_=nv_sr_2

 

 

Tags and Keywords:

Technology, Video Games, Game Development, Documentary, Review, PC Gaming, VR, Virtual Reality Gaming, Xbox, PS 4, Nintendo Switch

Ali F
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