Freebird! The Indie Buskers Want Game Inspiration
2012 will be the year of the gamejam: there's only a few hours left to pop over to the Indie Buskers website and drop an idea into their requests box. Five developers will be picking five game ideas and live-streaming the creative process for 48 hours. Why? Because they are poor and want to make something from their skills. Doing game busking on the street probably wouldn't have the same effect as signing 'No Woman No Cry' for three hours, but the internet is the perfect place for strangers to watch their code spill across the screen and offer up a few coins in appreciation.
I like the idea: it's a cute challenge, and the net result is more games and hopefully some slightly better off indie developers. The performance is free, so you don't even need to toss some coin to watch the games being cobbled together, and there will be work-in-progress releases.
The chances of something playable at the end of the marathon coding session is rather high: Sophie Holden completed 16 games in one weekend for the Pirate Kart. She'll probably have to force herself to slow down. The video below isn't a timelapse: it's how fast she works*.
*You really had to look down here to check that wasn't true?