Important: Whether you're coming to the physical site or just participating online, please RSVP on our Eventbrite page!

Playcrafting and the Bay Area Extra Life Guild are uniting to create the Playcrafting + Extra Life Game Jam, the first of two epic events to benefit the kids at the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals through the power of play. Games are an incredible medium for raising awareness, promoting change and touching lives, so this weekend, we're asking jammers to craft games that can either educate kids about health issues or can provide emotional support to young patients cope with the stress of being in a hospital.

These games will be played live for a crowd of 500+ - and shown online by some prominent streamers as part of a charity livestream - the following week at a 24-Hour Game Fest (see bit.ly/rsvpgamefest for details)!

Logistics

The Playcrafting + Extra Life Game Jam is open to anyone and everyone (developers, designers, artists, health professionals, and more!) who want to help create awesome games for a great cause, no matter your level of experience!

Jammers can participate from anywhere in the world, working either alone or in teams, though again, please RSVP on our Eventbrite page, and indicate whether you'll be participating online or at one of our physical sites, since we need to keep count of people for important things like food (and possible prizes!).

We also need the info to send out invitations to our Slack channel and Discord server, which will be used for pretty much all communications during the event! Prior to the event we will be using these channels to keep people posted about updates and allow people to get to know each other ahead of time. During the Jam we will use them for announcements, meal calls, and anything else that comes up - as well as to stream the talks and presentations!

If you are interested in doing a charity development livestream as part of this Extra Life event, please contact us!

Physical Sites

If you're based in San Francisco, Google has generously lent us use of their Launchpad space for the event. The site will be open starting Friday evening (May 5th) at the Google Launchpad in San Francisco (301 Howard Street) to meet each other, come up with ideas, form into teams, and begin hacking. Work will continue through Saturday (May 6th), and end Sunday (May 7th) when the teams will then present their final projects.

If you're coming to one of our sites for the weekend, we recommend you bring the following

• A laptop with everything you think you will need preinstalled
• Computer peripherals (headphones, external hard drives, power cables)
• Comfortable clothing
• A Camera (because what better way to document the event and the wacky late night moments that invariably happen at jams)
• A sleeping bag (if you plan on staying, as the site will be open 24 hours)
• Any other tools you think you might need to make a game!

We will be providing the following

• Meals, drinks, and snacks.
• Workspace, power, internet

Note: We're working on adding additional sites, so check back soon for details!

The rules

We will be including games created at this event in the archive of educational games being created by the IGDA's Serious Games Group, so please release your Jam project and its source under a MIT License. Our goal for this event is not only to create games to help people, but for good ideas to get out there to inspire others to do the same. For those who may be interested continuing to work on your game with the goal of a commercial release, don't worry! Only what is made as part of the Jam material will be open-source (provided you change licenses for your full game)!

Developers will also get the chance to showcase their newly created games during the follow-up 24-Hour Game Fest on May 13-14 for a crowd of 500+! More details on the follow-up event can be found here: bit.ly/rsvpgamefest

Our sponsors:

Google Cloud Platform

IGDA Serious Games