Tinker @ the Toaster welcomed participants with a fun new challenge

A variety of students from majors all across the University of Minnesota met for three nights straight for the Toaster’s first ever game jam, a departure from the classic Tinker event that the Toaster hosted for years.

In a game jam, all participants are given a certain amount of time to create their own game from scratch, test it and play it. In this particular game jam, contestants were given 48 hours.

The theme for all of the games obviously had to be one thing: Toast.

“But the ultimate goal is that you’re meeting new people, you’re creating things, you’re challenging yourself in ways that you wouldn’t be challenged during a normal game development process over several years,” Emerson Ironstone, the host of the event said. “And then you get something really cool at the end of it that you’ve made yourself.”

The Toaster runs the Tinker event every year. This year, they decided to switch it up and Ironstone hosted a game jam instead of the typical inventing workshop.

Some students had participated in many game jams and wanted more, while others simply saw the flyer in the Toaster and thought it would be fun to join.

The first night and first step was the hardest: brainstorming ideas with no technology to help. For Hafsa Islam, a product design student, the ideation was fun to see how everyone works through no-tech creation.

“I just wanted to hone in my skills and interact with more people,” Islam said. “[I like] the idea of having something more to put on a portfolio, and kind of just in general, hone and strengthen my skills.”

Many different competitors at the event repeated a similar sentiment; though they were playing to win, half of the fun was meeting new people and exercising their brain.

The contestants were able to choose between making a video game or a board game. The majority of the teams chose to build a video game from scratch. Though a video game could seem more challenging than building a board game, some teams said they chose it because they were more comfortable with that medium.

“Mainly just because of past experience and a comfort level,” Christian Garcia Garcia, a contestant in the jam, said. “I feel like everyone here is more familiar with video games.

He had the most experience with game jams, but his teammates had all been interested in video game design before coming to the Toaster. For Garcia Garcia, creating a video game is something he always had interest in and joined the Video Game Development Club to pursue.

“But it’s on a way larger scope over there, so I kind of wanted to do something that I could work on quickly with other people in a small amount of time,” he said.

With their limited amount of time, plenty of challenges came up for the teams, whether it be brainstorming creative ideas, making sure there was enough time to execute them, and figuring out what the team’s priorities were for their final product.

“One challenge was the complexity of a game, right?” Tsion Kebede, another contestant, said. “Like we didn’t want to create something that was too complex because that would take up time to sort of figure out the specifics of that.”

Kebede was a part of a board game team, and said ideating probably took the longest and factored in a lot about audience perception.

“Our game was more strategic,” she said. “We had to figure out something that wouldn’t overwhelm the audience with rules… figuring that out took a while.”

All teams were able to work through the challenges together and produce a playable game by Sunday, just in time for testing. The event concluded with a panel of judges playing all of the games and the awarding of prizes. Students and contestants were welcome to play the games as well.

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