A few months ago I had a brilliant little idea based on a prompt from Kickstarter. They wanted to see projects based around one-off or one-of-a-kind creativity, among others. I immediately threw together the bones of a Games Hack evening at my friendly local games store and stuck it up there on Kickstarter for the world to see. We didn’t get funded. It was a close run thing, but we didn’t make it.
The interest was clearly there and the more I thought about it, the more I reckoned opportunity was too good to be wasted. What hadn’t worked for a date in April may well hold together for a gig in July. So, in collaboration with Asgard Games of Walsall I have great pleasure in announcing the rebirth of the Asgard Games Hack on July 22nd.
It’s a straight competition. Up to twenty budding gamers working in teams or solo to complete a game from first inception to playable demo in two hours. I’m not pretending it’ll be an easy task, but there are prizes (not very good ones, you understand – we’re all a bit skint after the Games Expo) and the challenge of competing in a tight time frame should stimulate a bit of creative adrenaline.
Rather than host the booking on Kickstarter wherethere’s a chance it’ll fail to fund for the second time, I’ve moved to Eventbrite which allows me to see progress over time and generate bespoke links to track whether Facebook or blogging or Twitter is the king of selling tickets.
We want this to succeed because it’ll be a laugh and there’s a really good pub nearby that does ales of high quality. We also want it to succeed to put valuable funds into the friendly local games store. And most of all be we want it to succeed because there are too few opportunities for creative gamers to throw ideas around and learn from one another.
Birmingham Game Designers 
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