Sounds like a lot of fun. I've started collecting a bit of free art for exactly this reason :-)

So yeah, sounds good. I've got a PowerBook, so I'll be able to join in even for things like Unity that don't have a Unix/PC equivalent.

For things that do, like Torque, you might want to write to Anton. He rocks, and has a fair amount of free time these days. Granted, he hasn't replied to me about *my* game jam idea yet, but I suspect that just means he's traveling and hasn't seen the email yet.

Torque and Ogre3D probably look the most promising to me. Depends if you're looking for 2D or 3D -- if the former, Torque Game Builder looks like it's probably the way to go.

Ogre3D doesn't have quite the feature set of Torque, particularly when it comes to the network model. But graphically it's actually quite nice. And I suspect we won't need a big complicated network model for the sort of games we could produce in a weekend.

Then again, I *am* really curious how Torque manages to do server-side physics, interesting computational physics, and reasonably low latency. That's very tricky in general, and apparently it's hard to match Torque's internal integration there.

I'm all good with finding a weekend. President's Day weekend won't work for me, Krissy and I are going to see Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas while she's on vacation. The following weekend might, though. I'll ask her about that one. I know some friends of hers are in town at around that time, but I don't remember what we're doing with them, or how long it will take.

Okay. I've asked Krissy and bounced the idea off of Anton. I'll see how that works out :-)

As an aside -- the various Game Jam folks have tended to agree that having a theme, either technical or, um, thematic, is a good idea. For instance, a theme might be "physics engine", or "crowds", or "bouncing balls", or "building". Helps to keep people focused. So in addition to the basic technical theme ("let's see what we can do with Torque Game Builder in a weekend") you might want to consider a theme to help guide people.

Or you might not, but I figured I'd suggest it :-)

Oh, and yes - PopCap framework is PC-only, and non-Unix. It's DirectX-based.

I hadn't heard of this before, but the Irrlicht 3D engine appears to be remarkably portable and mature for an open source engine. There are also Ogre3D and CrystalSpace -- at least the latter is also quite mature and portable. Ogre3D looks nice, but I don't remember what all it runs on.

CrystalSpace does okay, but obviously you're going to have the option of shooting yourself in the foot :-)

Ogre and Irrlicht are usually used along with a cross-platform sound library. They're graphics-only, which doesn't mean a platform based on them has to be. One of the nice things about open source is the whole "mix and match" thing, though it gets annoying if you have components that are too intertwined with each other -- graphics and UI come to mind.

For free art, music and sound effects, the best resource I've found so far is the WorldForge SVN repository. Unless marked otherwise, all art is dual-licensed as GPL/GFDL, so very freely usable. A listing of the svn repository contents can be found here, and you can check it out via SVN as "svn checkout https://svn.worldforge.org/svn/media/trunk/". I think they prefer you check out the various subtrees individually rather than grabbing the whole trunk at once for reasons of server efficiency, but that might only be an old CVS bug and not apply to SVN.

There may be other good free art repositories, but I don't know much about that.

It looks like I'm free the weekend after president's day (that's the 24th-25th, right?), so I could do this. Yay!

I like the "one day 8 to 8" thing, if you think we can actually get people to be there for most of that time. Of course, if it starts with only three or four of us, that'll still give us a good chance to start trying to suck art in appropriate file formats in to the engine, which is all people will be doing at the very beginning anyway...

So yeah, count me as a vote in favor of "one day, 8 to 8".

Sounds good. I'll give the newly-available specifics to Anton and see if he's up for it.

Do you know what game engine you plan to start with?

Excellent. 2D or 3D?

(I'm good either way)

I like the idea of securing a bit of hosted space on the web and putting up links to various game jams, various free art we're starting with, links to different engines and a brief blurb about theme. The idea is that we could then upload any resulting code and whatever progress we made would be available for anybody later on to use, which I consider a really good thing.

SourceForge seems like the obvious place to do this, and I was looking earlier today at applying for a SourceForge project along these lines. To do so, we'd need to decide on a license for our code, though. Do you think anybody involved would be opposed to releasing GPL? As original authors they could still use it *themselves* for non-GPL'd purposes, just nobody else could. That would also be in keeping with the artwork's license, at least for the WorldForge assets.

It'd also be useful to come up with some kind of name for the project. I think "gamejam" isn't taken, though that's a tad grandiose. Or "gametank"? Dunno, mainly I figured I'd ask about the license, and the project name would otherwise only matter in the URL.

Sound good? Or would that be intimidatingly similar to publicity? I just like the thought of planning on making stuff public because otherwise this kind of thing really seems to sink beneath the waves...

That sounds excellent.