Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail and indie developer Fernando Ramallo want game creators to start working outside their comfort zones.
You may consider yourself to be a gamer, but let’s be honest: most of us don’t play all of the games. There’s usually always one or two genres you’ll pass on because you can’t get into them, or they rub you the wrong way. (Mine are RTS games. Want to love them, but just can’t bring myself to beat a single one.) Super Crate Box‘s Rami Ismail and indie dev Fernando Ramallo think it’s not just gamers that do this, it’s game creators themselves. Developers are also human and creatures of habit after all, and can be just as loathe to craft a game outside their comfort zone. That’s why Ismail and Ramallo hope to shake things up with “Fuck This Jam”, a week-long online game jam challenging creators to design games for genres they normally wouldn’t touch with a twenty-foot pole.
“Fuck This Jam is a call to developers to entirely rethink the kind of games they create and explore genres they would usually discard,” Ramallo explains. “We’re simply not sure of what this jam will bring, but it’ll definitely teach a lot of us developers things we otherwise would’ve simply never considered. Hopefully, we will be pushing genres past their preconceived notions and the individual developers to challenge themselves out of their comfort-zone.”
There should be no shortage of games to play once Fuck This Jam is complete; according to the official website, over 700 people have already signed up. Since the event is open to anyone in the world, we’ll hopefully see a mix of big names from the developer community and smaller indie devs all looking to try something new. If all goes as planned, Fuck This Jam will be be a fun event that brings fresh ideas to the genres we’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with. And if I’m especially lucky, maybe someone will make an RTS I’ll play through right to the end.
Fuck This Jam will run from November 9th to the 17th.
