Once again I’m part of the group organizing the Nordic Game Jam, the world’s biggest game jam and one of Denmark’s biggest game development events.
Last year I was already part of the PR team alongside Julie Heyde, but this year, even though I still get help from Julie and other members of the organizing team such as Guo Yu Pan, I’ll be taking charge of all the PR. Quite a hefty task!
During the last few months I’ve been silently making changes to the Nordic Game Jam website, cleaning it up a bit, giving it a wider theme to allow more content and bigger pictures and writing new text. Also the occasional blog post with things related to NGJ and to start hyping the event.
But now, with the ticket sales open for #NGJ14, I’m ready to reveal two videos I have been working on to kick off the promotion of the event:
First of all is a social media take on promotion. I asked a few people to send me very short video clips with their webcam where they explain why they think Nordic Game Jam rocks. After putting it all together in a nice, quick video, I ask viewers to send their own and share it on Facebook and Twitter using the #NGJRocks tag. Later on I plan on creating a mash-up of the best videos that will be shown during the event. It’s a great way to have the participants themselves get others excited about the game jam!
This is the video:
The second one was a bit more tricky. I collected a lot of feedback from students and people who are trying to get into the games industry who do not attend game jams because they think they are not ready for it.
That is one big problem, really. Game jams are actually a great environment to improve your skills and network with other people in the games industry. But you don’t really need to be an expert to attend one! Many people have their minds set thinking that a game jam is a contest: you go there to make the best game and win the competition. But the truth is that a game jam is far more than just a competition. You can take it as such, but you can also just attend because you want to make a team with people you’ve never worked together with before, learn some new ways of doing graphics, programming, you name it!
So to address that, I made a video explaining what exactly is Nordic Game Jam, combining footage from the previous year’s event and a simple flash animation. The tone is very friendly and casual to ensure that everyone wants to give it a try. Don’t have the necessary skills? Don’t worry! You can still try, or if you prefer, be part of the board games category.
This was the final result:
Of course there’s a lot more coming. Nordic Game Jam is still a few months away and we need to keep the momentum going from now on all the way until February 14th when the event starts. I have so many things to announce and hype from talks, workshops, keynote speaker…
It’s going to be a wild ride, but if it’s anything like last year, I’m all up for it!
NGJ14, here I come!