The team behind Hog Heist, winner of Best Overall Game at this year's GCPL Game Jam GameDev Showcase, pictured with GCPL's Fernando Aragon (in red and blue jacket) Photo by Rebekah Nichilo

UPDATE: The Developers of Hog Heist, winner of best overall game in GCPL's Game Jam and GameDev Showcase, published their game on Steam in July.

The Gwinnett County Public Library’s (GCPL) Learning Labs this spring hosted the library’s fourth annual Game Jam and GameDev Showcase, this year including 45 game developers and drawing more than 1,300 attendees who had an opportunity to meet the developers and try their games. Similar to hackathons, Game Jams are events in which individuals or small groups are given a theme and a limited time frame (in some cases as little as 24 hours) to create a video game from scratch or by using game engines such as Unity or Unreal. GCPL’s theme this year was “A Delicate Balance,” and participating developers were given six weeks—from March 1 through April 18—to create their games prior to the showcase event on May 3.

GCPL’s event originated in 2021 when—as part of his job interview process—Eli Frederick submitted a proposal for a community event where game developers could showcase their games. Frederick was hired, and as a learning lab specialist for GCPL he helped brainstorm ways to bring game development to the library. GCPL Learning Labs Supervisor Fernando Aragon turned out to be the perfect person to help lead and promote the event—he teaches courses on Game Development and Artificial Intelligence at both Georgia State University (GSU) and Gwinnett Technical College, as well as free coding courses at GCPL. “It worked out to have an opportunity for students to showcase their talents while also bringing awareness to the community that we are bringing Game Development to the library,” Aragon told LJ.

The first event was relatively small, with GCPL’s Duluth branch hosting a GameDev Showcase of four games from local developers in November 2022. The program has grown quickly since then. In 2023, GCPL decided to extend the time frame for the Game Jam developers to six weeks, and that July hosted a GameDev Showcase and Awards Ceremony for 15 submissions at the library’s Norcross branch.

Last year, GCPL began a partnership with the city of Lawrenceville’s Free Comic Book Day event, which takes place annually on the first Saturday of May. The event includes several local businesses and organizations, and Aragon said its scale “rivals many conventions…. We linked up and planned our Game Jam to take place before Free Comic Book Day so that we could have our Game Jam Showcase and Awards Ceremony there. We are grateful that [organizers Elyssa Pate and Lindsey Broome] included us and gave us a space in the beautiful Lawrenceville Arts Center Cabaret for the day.” Thirty-one games were submitted, the organizers of Atlanta’s Southern-Fried Gaming Expo sponsored the Game Jam, so GCPL was able to provide prizes to the winners, and “over 1,000 people (we stopped counting) came through to meet the developers and play their games!” Aragon said. As noted above, this year’s event—once again held in partnership with Free Comic Book Day—drew even more participants and attendees, with the GCPL Foundation providing prize money.

The Game Jams are open to anyone worldwide, although to be eligible for prizes, the creator or representative from a development team must be present at the GameDev showcase. Aragon said that the events have had participants from “all ages and demographics,” noting that this year’s youngest award winner was 14. “Since Free Comic Book Day is a family friendly event and our Game Jam submissions must not contain any offensive content, everyone can come in,” he explained. “There were a lot of library regulars that attended, and some submitted games as well. One of the beautiful things about the event is being outside the library—reaching out to those who may not be aware of how libraries have evolved. When I say I work at a library, there is often the misconception that libraries are ‘just books,’ but we are so much more!”

l.-r. Developers Stephanie Ponce-Henao (What Befell Orwell and Reaping What's Sewn), Tamaria Cobb (Trapeze Dreams), and Emma Thompson (Project Rat-tacular) Photo by Rebekah Nichilo

This year’s winner in the “Best Game Overall” and “Best Sound Design” categories was Hog Heist, a game in which players guide a pig around a gallery stealing artwork and other valuables while trying to avoid security guards. Two of the game’s developers, CJ Joyner, a GSU student studying game development and design, and Chris Calbert, who recently completed a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Computer Programming at GSU, have both participated in prior GCPL Game Jams as well as Game Jams hosted by other organizations. They said that it has been good to watch GCPL’s event grow, and that they appreciated the switch to a six-week format.

“This is a much longer Game Jam than I’ve done anywhere else, but it’s also really fun because it gives you enough time to get a team together and really work on something,” Joyner told LJ, adding that developers do their best at 48-hour events, but it’s just not a lot of time. “It really felt like everybody—or a lot of people—came [to the GCPL showcase] with fully finished games, and I thought that was really cool.”

Two-day Game Jams are “very fun” but can be grueling in terms of the sleep loss, Calbert added. With GCPL’s six-week format, “you have a lot more time to think of an idea, execute it, and fix anything if it goes wrong, because that will happen.”

Both Joyner and Calbert learned about GCPL’s Game Jam because they both took GSU classes taught by Aragon, and Calbert noted that any libraries interested in creating similar events should reach out to local colleges, high schools, and even middle schools to promote them. Aragon “has ample freedom to teach his classes while also promoting this program” for aspiring programmers and game developers, noted Calbert. People interested in this field “need practice. They need opportunities to make games.”

Aragon said that GCPL “has an amazing marketing team, and they…support us very much” in terms of getting the word out to the system’s branches, as well as the local community. “Every opportunity we can find…. Local schools. Reaching out and being persistent. It is helpful teaching Game Development at Gwinnett Tech and Georgia State University because I am able to encourage my students and others in the Game Development programs to take a big step and show off what they can do. A beneficial partnership with the Georgia Game Developer Association [GGDA] began in in 2021. Looking for opportunities for a group of my former students to showcase their final projects, I searched for local meetups and found that the GGDA was hosting their holiday party and that would include indie developers showing their games. I reached out to the President of the GGDA, Andrew Greenberg, to inquire about renting a table at the event for the group of former students. We attended, the students had a great time showing their games and getting feedback; we began to talk about how we could connect the GGDA with the library, and it just so happens that he is a longtime friend of my manager at GCPL.”

The winners of this year’s GCPL Game Jam and GameDev Showcase, all of which can be played in a web browser, are:

• Best Game Overall – Hog Heist
• Best Visual Novel – System Dive
• Best Action – Light Eater
• Best Other Genre – Forklift Frenzy
• Best Theme Adherence – Gravity Flipped
• Young Creator – Inverted
• Best Narrative – Hyphen
• Best Game Play Experience – System Dive
• Best Technical Execution – System Dive
• Best Sound Design – Hog Heist
• Best Art Direction – What Befell Orwell
• Great Start – What Befell Orwell
• Wild Card – Dragon Bachelors

As winners of the Best Overall award, Calbert and Joyner have been invited with the rest of the Hog Heist development team to showcase the game at the annual Southern-Fried Gaming Expo in Atlanta later this month.