Welcome to the inaugural TasJam!

We're very excited to have you join us for Tasmania's first statewide games jam and hope you're ready to get into it come Saturday morning! Before we get into it though, we thought you might like this chance to introduce yourselves; Who are you? What games do you like playing? What ideas and skills can you bring to a team? What are you most excited about for TasJam? If you had to fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses, which would you choose? Banana vs Pineapple? ... You get the gist.

To help you out I'll get the ball rolling:

Hello everyone! I'm mostly known as Ducky.

I'm a part-time web developer at a local web agency, as well as a university student. My majors are in Games Technology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and on top of these I'm also very interested in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). I used to mainly play first person shooters (CS:S!), but have significantly broadened my tastes since I left college and now have a shamefully large backlog of games I'm working through (darn you steam sales!). I am also absolutely loving the board game renaissance happening at the moment, and I'll probably have a few games on me if you ever need a break sometime this weekend ;)

Other than playing and making games in my spare time, sometimes I like to introduce coding to people by teaching them how to make simple games in python, and learning more myself! ... Oh and I have a very cute dog called Ada.

Anyway enough about me! How about you?

Hey everyone, this is super exciting!

I'm Jason Imms, mostly known as Jason.

I'm a games journalist, working primarily for Hyper Magazine, games.on.net, PC PowerPlay, and PC & Tech Authority, but with bylines appearing all over the place. I'm also the founder of the Tasmanian Gamdev Society, which I will now plug: Come and join the Tasmanian Gamedev Society! Learn who else is making games in our fine state, and take advantage of the wonderful opportunities that come from being a part of the broader Australian gamedev community (woah look at that, two plugs. SOMEONE CALL RIPLEY'S).

I have never been to a game jam in my life, so organising one has been a pretty interesting process. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you all produce, and getting a chance to meet you in person. Please come and say hello! I'll be around for the bulk of the weekend, though I must admit that I'll be disappearing under the cover of darkness to sleep in my own bed.

While I don't make games, as someone that has grown up with them and now covers them for a living, I find the process of designing and making them utterly intriguing. I can't wait to see it happening first-hand, right here in my wonderful home state.

Best of luck!

@jasonimms | jason@allegedlyinteresting.com

Hey if no-one else is sleeping, I'll introduce myself too ;)

I'm Ian Lewis, Founder of Giant Margarita and Lecturer at UTAS focussing primarily on our Games and Creative Technology major.

I'm a self-taught programmer who started creating games all the way back on the BBC Micro B, C64, Amiga, ... *a blur of other machines pass by* ... , until now primarily focussing in Unity. We've released two games already, Save the Teenies for iOS and Android (shameless plug #1), and Party Golf for Ouya, PC, soon to be on Forge, and hopefully on PS4 in the future (shameless plug #2). We also have two other as yet unreleased games, Pushover (a procedurally generated puzzle game) and Baggage Handler (as Party Golf was, the fruit of an internal Games Jam).

Oh and to answer Ducky's questions: I answered that; almost everything (but meh to RTSes); ideas, programming, and some programmer art; the collaborative spirit; 100 oh-so-kickable duck-sized horses; and duh, banana :)

Looking forward to meeting all the people I haven't met yet over the weekend :D

I'm Ivan. I lead a team of game developers within the School of Medicine at the University of Tasmania. We make serious games, notably simulators to train healthcare professionals, as well as games designed to help people achieve better health outcomes.

In my spare time, I also tinker at making games and audiovisual experiences, for the fun of it.

Hello! We're still wondering whether we already know everybody participating, but we'll see...

Paris and Jon are the co-founders the Secret Lab, a local game development studio that has been developing games (and apps, but mostly games) and running training for clients (e.g. ABC, CSIRO, Apple, Google, people from Pixar, and many many others) around the world since 2008.

We're working on several games –– including Button Squid, a puzzle game, Rocket Box, a economic space adventure, and Gnome's Well That Ends Well, for mobile devices.

We're trying to spend more time building our own games, and figure this is a great opportunity to do that...! Most of what we've built doesn't come out under our own name, and we'd like to address that.

We also write a lot of books for O'Reilly Media, and spend too much time speaking at conferences. We love to play board games (we have hundreds of them in our office), and drink whisky.

You can find us on Twitter at @thesecretlab, and also on Tumblr

Hey-oh,

Tim here, I assume most of the people going to the jam already know me but just in case you don't, I am Tim or McJones.

I'm the weird looking guy who looks sorta like someone hosed down a hobo, often found hanging around with the Secret Lab guys I am currently a utas PhD student and quite close to being finished. I also write iOS apps and co-write tech books with some friends, including a book on Kerbal Space Program which you should all play if you haven't.

In my copious free time I make little games that I generally don't allow people to see because I hate my own work, play lot's of games, play lot's of boardgames, and argue with people about any topic they care to argue on.

Kudos to Jason and Ducky (and anyone else involved) with getting this thing up and running, we need more games events in Tassie.

Hi TasJammers. We're Philip Loenneker and Nicholas King - a.k.a. Maven Consortium. We're a pretty new startup when it comes to making games, but we've got one mobile game project on rapid boil - a physics survival game set in space - and are hugely looking forward to the Jam tomorrow. (We even got ourselves t-shirts for the event, so the enthusiasm is rather overflowing!)

In short, Philip is technical stuff (development, IT, networking), and Nick is creative stuff (design, art, writing). But we overlap a bit on those too, and are always back and forth with ideas.

We've literally launched our website and social media stuff today, coincidentally just in time for the jam, so you can find us here at MavenConsortium.com.au, and on Facebook and Twitter. Our web presences are pretty new, but more content will be arriving soon.

Looking forward to some fun if busy times over the next couple of days :)

PS Definitely a horse-sized duck. Then you could tame it and fly wherever you wanted.