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Written by: Miikka Harjuntausta
Two game developers take an unprecedented game development journey from Helsinki to Malmö on May 12th – 17th creating a game while they cycle.
The duo travels with a tandem bike creating as green game as possible. The game jam happens on the saddle. One codes, the other one steers and solar panels produce electricity. Final destination of the team is Nordic Game Conference where the game will be displayed for fellow game developers around the world. The challenge is accompanied with a custom made computer attached to the bike and loads of Finnish game developer insanity.
The idea for the JamBike 2017 was originally conceived at the Indie Beer meetup in Helsinki as a joke about making a game on a bike. A year later, the gag is turning into a challenge with a serious intent. The goal of the insane experiment is producing a game 100% with renewable energies and encouraging healthy living habits – and of course like all other crazy game jams out there: creating a game under interesting development constraints testing the limits of game creators.
The development team consists of two indie game developers: A hardcore game jammer Samuli Jääskeläinen (@Zhamul) and IGDA Finland’s coordinator, cycling enthusiast Jonne Harja. Samuli has been doing One Game A Month Twitter challenge for five years, earned a title of “superjammer” from Finnish Game Jam and participated several game jams around the globe since 2012. When he is not busy with jamming, he works for Mindfield Games as gameplay programmer on vr games. Jonne has been a game industry freelancer, firestarter and webweaver for almost five years now. He has been a key player in the building of the Jyväskylä game scene and was one of the founders of the game business co-operative Expa. He gets a little bit too excited about crazy stuff and often manages to infect other people while at it. At the moment he is the Lead Coordinator of the already legendary IGDA Finland Helsinki Hub.
The experiment is supported by Finnish Game Jam organization and sponsored by a handful of courageous game companies including Fingersoft, Mindfield Games and Frogmind.
The jam is recorded on the road with a help of a small media team following the developer duo with a campervan producing tweets, posts and most importantly videos.
