Galway Game Jam Twitch recap 2022

An email landed in the Galway Game Jam inbox today with some fun stats. Ha, well I know I lost some folks with the words “fun” and “stats” together, but if I haven’t lost you yet, that means you are geeky/nerdy enough to be somewhat intrigued by the results.

These live streams occur over the course of our hybrid and virtual jams. So in a way it is a record of our commitment to providing an interesting event for our remote-jammers. Having this reminder is a nice way to share how much work goes into these events.

Broadcasts:	13
Hours Watched:	124
Days Watched:	5
Highest concurrent viewers:	22
Total Followers:	76
Channel Points:	6.9k
Chat Messages:	305
Top Categories:	Science & Technology

Now we have some data, let’s look at what’s behind it.

Generally we have two people hosting a livestream at any moment. Both are either engaging with the stream or one person will be monitoring the stream, Twitch chat and our Discord server for questions and comments from our remote jammers and viewers.

The hours watched seems to be total of all viewers time spent viewing the livestream. We operated a live stream for parts of the game jams. As we had 2x 16 hour jams and 1x 24 hour jam we can estimate total of 40~48 hours of livestream. As we generally have two people involved in the stream, we can get the estimated human labor cost of the stream itself as 2x 40~48, or 80~96 hours of human labour. Not an insignificant amount!

In addition, while these live-streams are operating, the management of the jam itself is spread to yet another volunteer/organiser. So, if we multiply the base watched hours by 3, we get the human labour of running the watched-hours of livestream while also running the jam.

That’s approximately greater than 120 hours of voluntary effort, to share knowledge and encourage the local/national game development community.

Now to consider all of the effort the jammers went into making games while we where livestreaming. Well, that would take a bit more granular research! Total jammers per jam changes, and people contribute differently to projects – sometimes there are hours when people are not working directly on a game, and sometimes people wake up in the middle of the night with a game idea. So it’s more difficult to track. Suffice to say, we’ve had 22 game projects submitted this year, and these games are from teams of 1-5 people. Not everyone would watch the streams, though their work would be shared at various points if they are happy to. I wouldn’t be shocked if total hours of game making effort at Galway Game Jam events over 2022 was over 1200, for 2×16 hour jams and 1×48 hour jam. I’ll leave you to do more math if you want and please feel free to leave a comment to put my numbers straight.

Given this brief moment of napkin-math analysis to consider how these numbers add up, we would like to put in another brief moment to extend a heartfelt gratitude to all!

Thanks

Thanks to our mentors

A huge thanks to our mentors for taking part in the live streams, for sharing their passion, curiosity, interests, advice, tips, wisdom and personal journey in game dev on the stream, and for showing us all how we can build better games together. Here’s a list of mentors to date – not just over 2022 – we don’t really have many places to thank them so I thought I’d give everyone a shoutout at once (some have come back more than once):

• Carlo Azzari
• Leela Collins
• Paul Conway
• Sophia Impetus
• Jean Finley
• Jamie Galvin
• Alanna Kelly
• Jupiter Hadley
• Basil Lim
• Alastair Low
• Saoirse Lynch
• Helen Lynch
• Nik Kemski
• Angelo Nicolaou
• Dave McCabe
• Sam Redfern
• Denman Rooke
• David Ryley
• (I think I may have missed one or two people so please get in touch if you don’t see your name here!)

Thanks to our volunteers

And to our very own volunteers and organisers and moderators who keep incrementally improving upon the live-stream experience and dedicate their personal time to providing the world not only with a game jam, but also with a window into our humble game jam that showcases the creativity and welcoming nature of our community. 2022 Volunteers/organisers:

• Darren Kearney
• Alanna Kelly
• Brian O’Brien

Special Thanks

And a special thanks to Gabe Mullarkey, Eoin Butler Thornton, Alan Duggan, all the folks at Ardán, Galway City Council Tourism dept, Anthony Shaughnessy, Aoife Cheung, Trevor Murray and Mary Rodgers from the Portershed and Sheila, Sarah, Brian and Noreen from Galway Technology Centre for helping to make this year a success, and for supporting the local game dev community.

Thanks to you!

Over 2022’s game jams from Galway Game Jam and our Global Game Jam event, our community has created:

• Galway Game Jam 20 “Propinquity”: 7 games
• Galway Game Jam 19 “Wild” / “Wild Galway”: 8 games
• Global Game Jam ’22 “Duality”: 7 games

Game Jam	Theme	Games
Galway Game Jam 20	“Propinquity”	7
Galway Game Jam 19	“Wild” / “Wild Galway”	8
Global Game Jam 2022 at Galway	“Duality”	7
Total		22

Thanks for watching!