Gaijin Jam #1 Hardcore Hackathon Completed: Summing Up

Gaijin Entertainment announces the end of the Gaijin Jam #1 Hardcore hackathon , where participants could only use their own engines. Their task was to make a game on the “Horde” theme in two weeks. As a result, more than 40 teams fought for the prize fund of 600 thousand rubles, and their work was evaluated by independent experts and leading programmers of Gaijin.

Anton Yudintsev, co-founder of Gaijin Entertainment, comments:

Given the complexity of the task, the number of participants exceeded our expectations, and the quality of many works also pleasantly surprised.

Yaroslav Kravtsov, co-founder of the game development studio Masterskaya 15 and one of the judges at Gaijin Jam, notes that the competition had “unexpectedly many results” and “some games stuck for a long time” .

The Gaijin Jam #1 awards were as follows:

• Best Gaijin Jam Game: "Oh Means Horde"
• Best Gameplay: Zombiepunk 2077
• Best Tech: "Oh for Horde"
• Gaijin Choice: "Prorva-2"
• Audience Award: "Mask, please!"

Roman Budkeev, one of the authors of the game “Oh means the Horde” , says:

Jam is a great compromise between the main project and coding "on the table". There is a wide field for creativity, a clear deadline for completion and an understandable audience of judges and other participants. We have never participated in jams before, because we never had the energy and time for it. But this jam was perfect for us engine writers. And the size of the prizes made it possible to forget about work and take risks.

In the first Gaijin Jam hackathon, only ready-made libraries and frameworks could be used, but not third-party engines like Unity and Unreal, so none of the jam teams could do without an engine writer. However, other interesting terms and conditions will apply in future hackathons to ensure that each Gaijin Jam is special and a new challenge for game developers.