About the Battle for Train Jam

Students will create a game over the course of a single school day to demonstrate their jamming and cooperation abilities. This is to determine a sufficiently capable pair that we will feel confident in sending off on a train!

What's the Train Jam?

Train Jam is a 52-hour game jam spanning across the entirety of the journey from Chicago to San Francisco. A pre-jam social occurs on the night before as a warmup for social funtimes. For more information, check the official Train Jam website for everything else at trainjam.com.

AIE Sponsorship for Students

We will be offering to send two or three students (one from Prog, one or two from either art track) to Chicago to participate in the trainjam. They’ll be provided with a Train Jam pass, which grants them access to the trainjam as well as a GDC Expo Pass so that they may browse the expo hall and help present their game at the GDC Train Jam booth. We'll be then helping them ship themselves back up to Seattle. They will be accompanied by Terry Nguyen, a Programming Instructor.

The student will be responsible for lodging during that period of time.

Selection Competition Details

In order to avoid any pretenses of favoritism or unfairness, we opted to go with a mini-competition from which the team with the best game will be shipped to Chicago for the train jam. Students must sign up in teams (one prog + one/two art).

What? Battle for Train Jam
When? December 18^th, 2018 from 9am to 6pm
Where? AIE Seattle's Classrooms

Rules and Criteria

The games will be subjected to a blind playtest by a panel of individuals who will come to a consensus on their favorite game.

Criteria

The games will be judged against the following criteria.

• Gameplay - the interactive and fun factor of the game
• Theme - how well the game adheres or integrates the theme into its design
• Originality - unique or creative aspects of the game that distinguish it from the rest
• Polish - the care and finishing touches that make a game feel good to play

Rules and Guidelines

• All works generated must be entirely original content or considered a derivative work. (see details below)
• Teams are prohibited from obstructing the efforts of other teams by any means.

What assets can I use for the competition?

The base expectation is that you are going to be creating all of your code and relevant assets from scratch as much as you possibly can. We want to send the most capable team we can, so we need to judge you on what you can do, not what Unity's demo team can create or KenneyNL can provide you.

Derivative works are permitted so long as they pass the bar for compo games set forth by the team over at Ludum Dare. While subjective, we will consider your work to be derivative and therefore permissible so long as you have transformed the work in some meaningful manner.

For further clarity, review the article from Ludum Dare and send questions to the organizer (listed below).

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Q: Can I use base meshes or project templates?

A: Yes, as long as you transform the mesh into something new and different. You are not permitted to use the asset as-is for the game jam.

Q: Can I use plugins, third-party libraries, or code from my previous projects?

A: Using third-party code like plugins is acceptable as long as they are publicly accessible. Reusing code from previous projects is acceptable as long as the original project is open-source and publicly available.
Publicly accessible includes libraries that you must pay in order to be able to use, though this may change in the future.

Q: Can I use tools to generate sound effects?

A: Tools like Unity, FruityLoops, etc., are totally permitted. The limitation on usage mostly pertains to existing assets designed to be used as-is. For example, if FruityLoops comes with a sample song, you cannot use it directly; you must remix or sample it in a significant manner for it to be consider acceptable.

Q: What's the policy on services like Mixamo?

A: These services exist in a much more gray-area because they are primarily online-only and would not be readily accessible during the actual Train Jam, where Internet access is limited. Your project must make light use of these services. For example, using animations from Mixamo is permitted but the characters are not. You must disclose the use of this service at the time of submission.

Questions and Contact Information

You can get in touch with Terry Nguyen <terryn@aie.edu> if you have any questions or concerns that you would like to express.