I don’t usually blog about personal events, but this weekend is worth an exception.
This weekend professional artists, designers, programmers, and game designers from around the world will gather for the Global Game Jam—an intense 48-hour game-making session. Some folks show up as teams, others arrive and hook up with people they meet at the jam. Then they stock up on pizza and spend the next two days working feverishly to complete whatever their sleep-deprived caffeine-infused imaginations can dream up. It’s wonderful!
What does all this have to do with Dream Flight Adventures, you ask? Well, the answer is quite simple. I’ll be attending it—with my seven year-old son.
This is Little Gary. Long ago, when I was seven years old, I made my first video game with my father. Now I’m going to do the same thing with my son.
A lot has changed since I made my first game. I used HyperCard (which I still miss dearly) on my family’s old Mac Classic (which I don’t), and my game—dubbed Gary’s Adventure—lasted as long as the ol’ machine’s hard drive. Today, my son and I have a huge expanse of great tools at our fingertips, and with a bit of elbow grease we can publish our creations on a variety of platforms and share them with the entire world. But one thing remains the same: a child’s dream will come to life.
So stay tuned to this blog over the weekend. We’ll be broadcasting from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, posting our progress as we go.
And who knows, maybe it’ll do to Little Gary what Gary’s Adventure did to me: set me on a path to dream big and then get to work making those dreams come true.
Buckle up. It’s going to be a weekend to remember.
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