Over the last few years at the University I have run some events known as "Game Jams" for the students. These have also become increasingly popular over recent events.
For those of you who have not heard this term, it is basically a 24hr/48hr hackathon where the participants, either individually or as part of a team, get to test out their skills and any new ideas to make a game based on a theme (such as "Waves" or "Time Travel"). The students generally love them (as do quite a few members of staff who take part).
They are not graded on it but they do get to win a few prizes (from the department budget). A larger scale example is here: https://globalgamejam.org
I was wondering if anyone on these forums would be interested in similar. In particular I was even thinking that if we set the theme to something less game related and more like "Utilities", we could end up with some cool results. For example if we got 20+ people involved and we each wrote a tool like a text editor, calculator, app menu, etc. We would have a fairly decent start to a FreeBSD specific desktop environment. We can perhaps also build on this in the next "Games Jam".
Some random ideas:
For those of you who have not heard this term, it is basically a 24hr/48hr hackathon where the participants, either individually or as part of a team, get to test out their skills and any new ideas to make a game based on a theme (such as "Waves" or "Time Travel"). The students generally love them (as do quite a few members of staff who take part).
They are not graded on it but they do get to win a few prizes (from the department budget). A larger scale example is here: https://globalgamejam.org
I was wondering if anyone on these forums would be interested in similar. In particular I was even thinking that if we set the theme to something less game related and more like "Utilities", we could end up with some cool results. For example if we got 20+ people involved and we each wrote a tool like a text editor, calculator, app menu, etc. We would have a fairly decent start to a FreeBSD specific desktop environment. We can perhaps also build on this in the next "Games Jam".
Some random ideas:
- This format would also be ideal for those who do not develop software professionally or might be a bit rusty. Writing a simple image viewer is a much easier task to accomplish in a day or so compared to fixing a full featured one from Gnome. It should be fun and "light" rather than a chore.
- If people like the idea of a prize, perhaps we can just donate tech "junk" to the winner. I have stuff ranging from novelty pens, all the way up to older graphics cards. I am sure we all do
- If we do decide on desktop utilities rather than games, we could possibly agree on a widget toolkit (and a language) before hand to keep things consistent. However I think this should be fairly flexible to keep it "fun" rather than "correct".
- If people prefer to write games, fair enough, we could have the theme being "Beastie" or "FreeBSD awareness" to keep it slightly on track!
- Can a text editor be written in 24hours? Yes, if the scope is kept small (like Microsoft Notepad). This itself could actually be a really unique way to reduce "open-source bloat". Likewise developing our (winning!) entries in isolation prevents it becoming a modular monolith (like libgnome, libxfce4util, etc).
- Big tasks involve a File Manager, Window Manager. However I am sure some here are up for the challenge. Most importantly having an extremely basic file manager rather than none at all is still cool (and might win!). The window manager could even just be a simplified hack of OpenBox or lesstif's mwm.
- At the uni we also provide an "art" prize for the 3D modelling students. Potentially we could so similar here.
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