Today we're launching our first ever Tech Jam.
 
This is something I've thought about doing for a while. The Game Jams are great, but there's a lot of boilerplate involved in making a game, and it's not always that important. And inevitably the larger, multi-discipline teams always stand the best chances of winning.

So I wanted to do something that solved all that. Throw away the vegetables, and the plate, and the table - and just concentrate on the meat.

It's pretty easy to get started..

Our engine is pretty easy to get into. It's got a scene editor, GameObjects and Components. All code is in C#. Shader code is in hlsl. It has super fast hotloading.

We have a bunch of documentation here, but please let us know if you're finding anything difficult and we'll try to make things more obvious.

Our previous Jams had first, second, third - but they were all rated on the same thing - "best game". We found this was very limiting, both to entries and when we were judging. There were games that did one thing particularly well, but didn't win because they did other things less well than the other entities.

The Tech Jam has multiple, varied categories. We're hoping this is more inclusive in as much that even non-programmers stand a good chance of winning one. We've tried to keep them as vague as possible, so there's room for interpretation.

This feels right. It's something we'll be doing in all our future Jams.

It's not in your favour to do this. If you're smart you'd keep it to yourself and increase your chances of winning with less competition.

But please pass it on to someone that could be interested.

You know who I'm talking about. Maybe they've been posting screenshots of their Source Engine maps for 15 years and have never actually released their maps anywhere. Maybe they're always posting videos of impressive stuff they've made in Unity, but never actually release anything because it's not feasible to spend 20ms rendering clouds in any game.

I know it's really our job, and we're trying, but you stand a better chance than us. Maybe you could just shoot them a message and tell them about s&box. Let them know what we're trying to do. Let them know it's all free so they have nothing to lose. Let them know a lot of the skills they already have, like from GMod, CSS, Unity and C#, are transferrable. If they refuse, maybe get militant about it. Make everything about s&box. When they post a photo of their kid's birthday on Facebook, post about s&box on it. If they still refuse to enter the contest, unfriend and block.

I'm expecting to be surprised. If that's possible. The scope of things that you could submit is huge, but the actual thing you need to make can be quite small, laser focused.

I'm expecting people to make awesome looking maps like things we've never seen before in the Source engine. Using the volumetric lighting, bloom, dynamic reflections. All that good stuff.

I'm expecting people to create scenes in the scene editor, by arranging models, setting up lighting, some ambient sound, and cool particles, all to make something very special.

I'd expect people to create verlet systems, liquid systems and other dynamic physics systems to make really interesting interactions.

I'd think someone would be able to decypher the shader system to make things impressive and beautiful.

I can imagine someone using some open web api to stream in data that they could then use to create world geometry and textures on the fly, creating a procedural world.