On Thursday, May 16th, the Finnish Game Jam ry board members attended the Finnish Game Awards 2024 gala. As is tradition, the FGJ president, Teemu Kokkonen, awarded the Jampion of the Year award, this time to Laura Piispanen.
Teemu Kokkonen has also announced his retirement from the position as president. Teemu has held this function since 2020, and during his tenure, the FGJ organization has grown in numbers – despite the difficult challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. FGJ thanks Teemu for his service as president, especially as most of the current board members have joined thanks to him.
The new president of Finnish Game Jam ry is Jani Gröhn. Additionally the board also has a new vice president, Ren – . Finally, Irina Kekman joins the board, and was chosen for the new role of FGJ publicist. Teemu Kokkonen remains on the board as a deputy member.
All FGJ board members, active and deputies likewise, are committed to and actively working towards making FGJ a safe community for all, and aim to ensure all of FGJ events are a safe space for everyone attending.
Jam Jam is a two-day summer festival and retreat for game jam organizers and anyone interested in learning, discussing and sharing ideas on game jams.
Jam Jam 2022 consists of a workshop day and talks on game jams and jam games. During your visit you can decide what you work on – bring your jam organizing team and work with planning or debriefing your jams or come without an agenda and talk with all other jam organizers and jam-organizers-to-be, brainstorming new jams and sharing lessons on organizing events.
Retreat in a cozy cabin environment
The event is located in the middle of a Finnish forest, on top of a mountain called Sappeenvuori – about 2 hour car ride from Helsinki (see details from Sappee.fi). The venue consists of eight well-equipped cabins with saunas and hot tubs surrounded by the beauty of a Finnish forest and the power of the midnight sun of the Northern summer.
Join the team of volunteers
Right now we are looking for volunteers to make the event possible to organize. Please fill the forms below if you are interested to be involved in one of the greatest events in Finnish Jamming Summer!
In Finnish Game Jam 2022, Tampere is one of the biggest sites! They’ve managed to gather 74 participants online. Tampere Site Organizer Pekka Nordlund, how’s it going so far?
“Warmest greetings from Tampere! We started this year with two ice-breaker evenings, filling the pre-jam anticipation with some good old laughter over online gaming.
Our site is nice and busy with jammers joining us all the way over from Oulu and Rovaniemi, and with us being online, we’ve even heard a game pitch live from a grocery store! Today we organizers will be hosting a pizza draw to follow the Tampere pizza tradition with the help of our local sponsors (Tampere Game Hub and 10tons Entertainment) so it’s safe to say that games will be made!”
#FGJ21 will happen January 29-31st 2021, as a part of Global Game Jam. If you want to organise your own site now its the time to register.
As you may have noticed, we are having a little unconventional year, which understandably also affects jamming, and the next GGJ/ # FGJ21 jam. Therefore, we have unsurprisingly made the decision to host the next event fully online.
Head out now to https://globalgamejam.org/ to register a site for your City, School or Company. To name your site use the following formula:
It is with heavy hearts that we are cancelling Jam Jam 2020 due to the Covid-19 crisis. We are truly disappointed that after a year’s worth of planning this year’s event, we won’t be able to bring together our fellow jammers, educators, partners, and invited guests.
Everyone who purchased a ticket will receive a full refund in Eventbrite in the near future. We will do our best to ensure that the refunding process goes as smoothly as possible.
We want to thank you all for your support. We believe that great things happen when the community comes together and connects all of us. Plans for Jam Jam 2021 next summer are in the works and additional details will be announced later.
If you have any questions regarding the Jam Jam 2020 cancelation please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Please take care of yourselves, your family and friends! During these uneasy times, we should unite now more than ever and fight the spread of Covid-19 together by washing hands and engaging in social distancing. Stay healthy!
On Friday December 13th we gathered together at Finnish Game Jam Awards to celebrate not only jam games but also all the great people in the community!
All of the awarded games have been made in different game jams organized by Finnish Game Jam during the 2019 season.
Home is a place that keeps us warm and safe. But what happens when you end up without a proper home and even your temporary dumpster gets taken away? Life Of John provides a unique and emotional experience while reminding us that helping others when they are at their lowest point might save humanity. Life Of John is a beautiful narrative experience with simple yet interesting gameplay. This immersive game essay created in a one-man team clearly stands out from the Finnish jam games of 2019.
What do you get when you combine hamsters, pears and awesome game technology from the ’80s? A game about pooping hamster with sweet Game Boy tunes. The Poopster is a very wholesome retro package of graphics, gameplay, and music. It was made during Assembly Game Jam 2019, at the best Finnish jamming place to explore commercially obsolete old hardware and to show to the world how the jammers don’t let the platforms of the past to be forgotten in silence.
Human Rescue Reversed Roles Award FGJ19 Next Games Helsinki
Pekka Kujansuu
Petri Räsänen
Who is the dog’s best friend? Human! Rescuing humans from the streets is the job of a truly virtuous dog! Human Rescue a simple jam game with great gameplay and polished cartoony visuals. The attraction of the game lies in its role-reversing core: In Human Rescue you are tasked to adopt humans and use them to adopt even more humans. Who would let humans roam around the streets aimlessly and without guardians anyway?
We know very well that winter in Finland can be tough – especially for the small birds! For our pleasure, the birds that do not migrate stay behind and delight our forests with their tweets, from their homes. Where The Birds Are is a very Finnish, minimalistic and calming piece of game art. In this game, you are tasked to set up birdhouses to trees and solve the puzzle while music grows as you advance and see where the birds are. Calming games are still a rarity and such pieces definitely stand out from the jam crowds!
Finnish appreciate games, coffee, technology, and sustainability – so why not games about barista robots with organic beans! In Mochabot Organic players receive the orders and brew the coffee with the help of a cute, relentless barista bot. This jam game is served with a minimalistic color palette and a great art style in a package of multiple minigames that soothe your caffeine-induced brains.
Sleeping Bunny Midwinter Dream Award FGJ19 Games Factory Helsinki
Arhi Makkonen
Henri Viitanen
Winter is here… and we all need to keep warm, bunnies too. Furthermore, what would be a better winter hobby than sleeping by the warmth of a fireplace? Sleeping Bunny takes the player on a wintery journey to save a bunny from cold and sleep deprivation. This jam game offers consistent and stylized art with simple and elegant gameplay – a jam game at its best! Simple yet surprisingly challenging gameplay of Sleeping Bunny lets the player unravel the goal on their own and minimalistic, as well as atmospheric audio space, supports the immersive narrative of the game. Playing a piece like this puts smiles on our faces and goodnight dreams in our heads.
Special Awards
Julius Jämsen Jamtivist Award
What would game jams be without music? And even more importantly, what would music be without jamming together? Julius Jämsen brought the jam-lovers together with a power of musical jamming at Jam Jam 2019. If there has ever been a sleazy song about game jamming, we are confident that it cannot beat the ooze of love that this international and multilingual eight-minute song has to offer. A true jamactivist act of bringing people together deserves an acknowledgment of the Jamtivist Award 2019!
IBM Future Award
Game jams use technologies from present and past, but how about the future? We have been told that the future is quantum and quantum is playable! Goes without saying that anything that we can use for play, we jammers, love! In February 2019, IBM provided the first-ever live access to and developer support for the quantum computers at the Quantum Wheel game jam. We were humbled by such privilege and now very eager to see what the quantum future will bring for us jammers. We believe that combining the power of future technologies and bravery of the jammers can take us far and let us have fun while doing it!
Outstanding Support Awards
Futureplay
Veikkaus Game Studio
Neogames
Finnish Game Jam organization would be nothing without the community. Every year and every jam is a joint effort of organizers, participants, jamtivists, jamthusiasts, jam friends and lovers – supporters of all sorts. This year our biggest supporters were Supercell, Veikkaus Game Studio, and Neogames.
Another FGJ great event is over. We want to thank all the winners and all the event participants. It would not happen without you! Thank you!
As a part of our scholarship program, the Finnish Game Jam sent Adelina Lintuluoto to the Slavic Game Jam (PL) to represent the Finnish jamming scene. Here is Adelina’s report about her jam experience.
Slavic Game Jam 2019
Slavic Game Jam (SGJ) is an event focused around game development. It takes place each year in Warsaw, Poland. At its core lies the 48-hour long jam. SGJ is all about providing a competition-free, friendly environment for jammers with lectures, workshops, a pre-party and a hand full of other activities. This year was the fifth edition with over 200 participants. They aim to be a truly international event, this year with participants from places like all the Nordic countries, France, Switzerland, Russia, Germany, Czechia and many more.
I arrived in Warsaw early on Thursday and swung by the hostel recommended to me by the event organizers. My naivety and optimistic view on life usually puts me in trouble, just as it did when I arrived at the reception, and tried booking a bed only to have the staff laugh in my face saying I definitely should have booked ahead (disclaimer; don’t imagine a Disney villain laugh, more of an amused chuckle. The staff at this hostel was incredibly nice and helpful. In general, the hostel was in top shape!). They said they could offer me one night, which I gladly accepted. Sleeping at the jam site was always an option anyways!
The ‘Slavic talks’ would only start at 2 P.M., so I had a few hours to explore the city. This is about the time I realized Warsaw is an amazing place for vegan cuisine! I happened to pass by a few vegan restaurants thinking ‘oh I must’ve stumbled in on a vegan street’. However next corner — same thing. I enjoyed the street food as much as I could, but the catering at the jam was amazing so I also made sure never to skip a meal there.
The venue for the talks, as well as, the rest of the jam was the Centre for Innovation and Technology Transfer Management, located at the Warsaw University of Technology. The Centre is a newly built six-story building that provided us with plenty and spacious rooms with big windows and nice air condition. The talks were versatile and interesting! Ranging from ‘A Narrative Designer coming out of her well to shame mankind!’ by the one and only Julia Rässa, to ‘Game jam pitfalls and how to fall into them gracefully’ by a new favourite speaker of mine, Sos Sosowski (footnote; this is when I realized Julia would also attend the jam! Which made me so happy. Isn’t it amazing traveling for jams and reconnecting with friends you’ve made along your jamming path?)
Thursday ended with a pre-party at a cool location, cool music, cool people. So cool that when the night ended, me and my two newly made friends, Lucas and Gin, didn’t feel like heading back to the hostel just yet. We decided to head for the closest open shop. However when we reached it we had sobered enough to realize that getting two extra hours of sleep before a game jam is definitely more valuable than two extra hours of beers and late night storytelling.
The Slavic Game Jam is the chillest jam! The organizers encouraged the participants to have fun and goof around as much as possible. And I had the best team for that! My team for the jam consisted of Julia Rässä and Arash Naderi. The theme of this year was ‘Growth’ and we came up with an amazing idea: fondling low hanging fruit, hold the applause, to check for cancer! It was an idea we had a hilarious time coming up with, and it kept us laughing throughout the making of it (as well as fairly clear as to give us as much time as possible to goof around at the site and have fun with the rest of the jammers). Arash found a spot for us in the board game-jamming room. I kept glancing over my shoulder at this one board game being made. It looked amazing and finally I cracked, leaving my teammates for a few hours to selfishly play the game with creator Mantis Kozlowski, and somehow apparently help them create it. That’s the beauty of board games; the game mechanics can be set up in a matter of minutes, and then you iterate them by playing until you find the best version of the game. Playing is essentially making it!
The organizers came up with this thing called Hydepark, which happened for the whole duration of the jam. Anybody could book the seminar room to.. do whatever felt right. Do you want to have a project showcase, give a lecture or just play switch on the big screen? No better place than Hydepark. I can’t possibly count all the different activities, since there were new ones almost every half an hour, but to name a few; relax workshop, loving and owning your bugs a story sharing opportunity, karaoke, blender workshop, second and annual Mario tennis tournament.
So far I’ve only mentioned it once, which is not nearly enough. The catering at the jam was legendary. Full stop. We had meals three times a day; breakfast, lunch and dinner. In addition to that we had a full-time available stock of fruits and bottled water. Even more, thanks to Google for Startups, who had a coffee stand open most of the day, we maintained the correct levels of caffeine and happiness. The organizers tediously encouraged us to eat lots of fruits and greens, drink water, sleep enough, move around, leave the computer now and then. The latter was nicely achieved on Saturday when we had an outdoor barbeque! Barbeque at a jam? Yep, that’s right, all you other jams now have to live up to that.
So much happened at the jam, so many amazing encounters with people. You remember me not getting a bed at the hostel? Well, Vador, a SGJ veteran with an apartment in Warsaw, stepped in and without hesitation offered me to stay with him and Julia. I can’t name drop every person I met but also worth mentioning are Radim, who always stuck by my side no matter how hopeless I was (#iblamelinux #justkiddingiloveyoulinus), Pablo for dropping by to make sure Julia’s and my humor stayed as cringe worthy as possible and that the puns of fondling fruit kept rolling in, and Elias for being a great conversationalist and my first opponent in a long row of people who I heroically beat in my favourite game jam game ever made.
The jam ended on Sunday with showcasing the games. To stay true to the chill ambience that had been present during the whole jam nobody had to prepare presentations for the big screen. Instead we just walked from room to room and checked out the other games. As it seems, keeping a non-competitive environment and encouraging everybody to eat well, drink water and sleep, resulted in a bunch of amazing games. You can find all the games here, among my favourites to try out is a snowboarding pear, a sawfish that saws and a two-player vine vengeance game.
The jam ended with a heartwarming talk from Kacper Domanski and the rest of the organizers. I had to actively resist my urge to stand up and go full Keanu Reeves, “Kasper you are breathtaking! Organizers you are breathtaking! Everybody attending the jam is breathtaking!”
I had plans to leave for Krakow after the show reel with a friendly soul who was driving there from the jam. However the day was not completely over with an after-party still on the schedule. How could I leave all my friends there? Instead, I decided to take the chance and find a way to get to Krakow the next day. The after-party was the perfect ending to the event, just all of us chilling at a bar reminiscing about the past couple of days. Kacper being the amazing host that he is invited as many as could fit to the after-after-party at his apartment. I heard whispers of Soplica and Switch, however sadly at this point the jam tiredness had viciously caught up to me.
I was really eager to go to Slavic Game Jams. After all the amazing things I’d heard from friends I thought ‘surely flying to Poland must be worth this.’ I was not disappointed. This event exceeded all my expectations. The relaxing atmosphere, abundance of awesome people and generous organizers made it all to what it is. It was my first time in Poland and I fell head over heels for it. It was with a bitter taste I left Warsaw however happy knowing that there is only one year left until the next one 🙂
The Finnish Game Jam (FGJ) is sending Adelina Lintuluoto to the Slavic Game Jam in Warsaw as part of the FGJ’s Scholarship Program. Lintuluoto is a physics student at the University of Helsinki and has always enjoyed being creative. She recently found an outlet for that in game development and has jammed by programming in both Unity and Godot engines, while helping out with pixel art and story writing. She has participated at the Global Game Jam in 2018 at FGJ’s Arabia site and in 2019 in Geneva Switzerland. She has also jammed at Quantum Wheel 2019 and volunteered at Jam Jam Festival 2019.
The scholarship includes a ticket to the event and a 200 EUR travel stipend.
The FGJ Scholarship Program was created to help Finnish jammers to travel to international game jams to promote the Finnish jamming scene, share jamming culture and promote international cooperation.
Slavic Game Jam (SGJ) is a game jam in Warsaw, Poland, organized for the 5th time in 2019. Last year SGJ had over 200 participants, and the total number of games developed at all previous events combined is over 250. Website: https://slavicgamejam.org/
Sixth Isolation Jam was held June from 5th to 9th in Laxahvammur fishing lodge, middle of nowhere, Iceland. I was there with 13 other jammers to jam and have fun for a weekend. We were also joined by Subpixel Team who were filming a documentary about the jam. The documentary should be out in a couple of months, keep tuned! Jam produced a handful of games, you can see some of them here. Submitting the project was voluntary and working on personal projects was allowed, so not everything that was produced during the jam is at the Itch page.
The jam didn’t have a theme, but the extreme nature around us and the isolated jamming environment were encouraged to be used as a source of inspiration. Jóhannes, the organizer of the jam, is a sheep farmer and we got to pet his sheep and newborn lambs on one evening. You can see sheep as an indirect theme as the jam as most games featured them in some shape of form. We also did a small hike on the fields before starting the jam. The weather was really nice, the wind was strong, as it always is in Iceland, but the sun was shining warmly. We really lucked on the weather for the weekend!
Our team made a pocket sized ram adventure, Woolball’s backyard, during the weekend. I wrote the game logic and Sofi Kurtti organized the pixels on the screen into nice shapes. Our goal was to try out zgb, a game engine for the original Game boy. The game turned out really well and we had fun tossing our Game boy during the development to other jammers to get some quick playtesting in. The lodge also had a lan setup of three original Xboxes for nightly Halo 2 battles after each jamming day. So obviously we also put the game on a game boy emulator on Xboxes and played it on the big screen after it was done!
I’ve jammed around the world on various different game jams. Isolation was definitely one of the more memorable jams I’ve had the pleasure to attend. The relaxing atmosphere, inspiring locations and fun people made it an awesome weekend. All the non-jamming related activities gave nice breaks to coding, but didn’t divert too much to affect productivity. Iceland is an interesting country and every time I visit there I learn more how horribly ruthless nature there is. All the people jamming were great, it was nice to catch up with some distant old friends and make new jammer buddies!
Isolation Jam will happen next year one again. Follow Kollafoss Game Farm for further information. The space is limited, so be quick to apply when registration opens!
Let us know if you are traveling to an interesting game jam somewhere in the world – we would be happy to host a story of it at Finnishgamejam.com!
