JAM IT IN 2023

...was a success. Absolutely. And we've agreed that this is a most mondo thing and must continue happening: yearly, if not more often.

We piled into the living room, set up, and jammed out for ~2.5 days, stopping briefly to eat and sleep. There were still some technical difficulties incurred from trying to livestream on multiple platforms at the same time. We were using Discord to screen share, and had a webcam facing the jam area, and broadcasting that via Twitch. Discord wanted to grab the audio and not let it go, so the Twitch stream (which ran the entire length of the jam) was silent. This was probably just as well, as it saved people from logging in at 4 AM and hearing nothing but snoring and/or conspicuously fast-paced techno.

Just like the week prior, there was so much energy in the room it was impossible to not keep moving forward. We all made solid progress on our entries, including Begui, who started from scratch with SDL 3 and Tiled. GDR members popped in occasionally to watch and/or chat, and at the end we streamed short demonstrations of our entries.

So.... there were multiple lessons here, and I'll try to go through them as I remember. First up, the video capture box I bought works well enough, but Deleter couldn't find an easy way to disable DHCP on his video adapter, and as such the box wouldn't pick up his signal (boo!). Once again, anti-piracy efforts only succeed in inflicting collateral damage on people just trying to do their thing. The webcam itself was an el cheapo unit I bought for testing, for the low-low price of less than 20 USD. That it functioned at all is impressive. It lacked a bit in terms of low-light fidelity, and the FOV was fixed, and a little too narrow. I'll be picking up a much better cam for next time, specifically aimed at combating this deficiencies.

Next up, as this was all a first-time effort, we didn't quite emphasize the scheduling as well as we should have, and indeed we didn't have a rigid schedule. I arrived Thursday night, and immediately started planning my weekend. We finally broke around 4 PM EST on Sunday and streamed the live demo, but only announced it half an hour prior to the event itself... mostly because we didn't know when it would happen. So we need to do a better job of setting things down, but now that we've done a dry run and the actual event, we have a good idea of how things will play out (more or less).

Lastly, we'd like to get more people involved, especially GDR members who are too far away to travel, or just have hectic schedules. I've suggested hosting a separate JAM IT IN NORTH (aka BREAK IT OFF). But I've got my hands full for JAM IT IN SOUTH, so someone else will have to take up the mantle for that to happen. We're also interested in setting up some sort of hub for allowing people to jump in and share their screens as well. Discord can do this, but I'm imagining something akin to a wall of small streams on a page, and you can zoom into whichever one you want. Hopefully someone out there has a canned solution for this -- I'll start looking into it.

October has always been my favorite month of the year, and it just got a hell of a lot better. Many thanks to Syn9, Deleter, and Begui for live participation, Sonrisu for his remote entry, and everyone at the GDR who tuned in and gave us encouragement.