As you might have seen yesterday (just scroll down a bit if you’re on the front page) I wrote up a post introducing the first Global Game Jam. The GGJ is the first of its kind in which teams of aspiring designers and developers get together to produce a working videogame within 48 hours, and it’s happening everywhere from Perth to Pittsburgh.

Can it be done? Will the games be fun? Or will it simply rob some talented people of well-deserved sleep? More rhetoric than you can shake an Obama at and more after the jump…

Across the world, as I type, various designers, coders and artists are working together to produce a fully-playable game in the rather restrictive environment of a single weekend. Following the keynote speech yesterday – which I missed, thanks to the efficiency of Scottish transport – teams were made and everyone got to work.

Just over 24 hours in to the event, things are going well in Glasgow; some games are already well-formed, which would appear to confirm that yes, you can make a game in 48 hours with some like-minded individuals. Chatting to Romana, one of the Glasgow organisers, she summed up Glasgow’s current situation: “doing OK actually; some folk have crashed on sofas but doing good, spirits are high.”

When I say the games are well-formed, they really are well-formed. One game concept, showcased on the Glasgow Game Jam’s blog, has already come to fruition from concept art to functioning demo, and there’s even some 3D models being sculpted in rapid time. It’s all looking extremely impressive (check out a video of Glasgow’s work so far here).

Elsewhere in the world? New Zealand is kindly informing us that we just lost The Game (and you just have too) and nobody else seems to be running a Ustream channel at the moment. We can only assume that people are hard at work. After all, the best results will be showcased at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and if there was ever something an aspiring developer wanted to put on their CV that would probably be it.

It all looks reasonably calm, considering there’s only 48 hours of time to work with. The Glasgow web-stream has a prime view of a couple of guys hard at work on…something (Ustream’s not exactly HD) and while not as exciting a spectator sport as others, it certainly makes for interesting discussion. Would you, for instance, be able to create a fully-working game in 48 hours?

No development studio could possibly know a crunch time quite like this, and while the public is a judge of quality like no other, I think industry professionals are a good source of a second opinion. After all, Denki Games, Crackdown dev Realtime Worlds and TrackMania DS developer Firebrand will be present in Glasgow tomorrow to evaluate the creations with their experienced eyes.

I’ll be swinging by Glasgow Caledonian tomorrow afternoon (around 1pm, internet stalkers) to take a look at what’s been made over the weekend, and I’ll be sure to report back then. Until tomorrow, I leave you with this question: do you think you could really make a game in a single weekend? Or, like one of the Glasgow participants, would you just crash out?

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