I wasn’t just there for the free badges, though. On Saturday, I participated in the Rock, Paper, Shotgun game jam – a frankly terrifying event where a dozen or so developers were given a theme, about six inches of desk space and one hour to produce a game.

I’m delighted to say that I made something that I was pleased with, that the audience seemed to enjoy and that didn’t break when I attempted to demo it to the 300 or so people in the room. I don’t want to give too much away, but the theme was “resurrection” and it’s a take on the typing tutor genre.

You can play Awake here.

The whole experience was terrific fun, and I strongly urge you to check out what the other developers got up to – without sounding too soppy, it’s genuinely inspiring to see what people can do with an hour and a bit of determination. Both Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Forbes have great write ups.

We at Littleloud sponsored the Brighton outpost, providing beer and pizza to the developers, artists, musicians and designers who turned up to create games in just 48 hours.

I can personally vouch for the fortifying effect of the beer and pizza, as I was one of those developers. I took the following tweets as my inspiration: “You know in cut scenes when it says 3 months later…? What if the game ACTUALLY locked your save file for 3 months?” and “What if games rewarded you for believing rather than winning?”. From these, I came up with a gentle and melancholy adventure game starring swans, which takes place over six real-time days. If that description hasn’t put you off too much, you can play Six here.

Our Technical Director, Iestyn, also made a game. Taking “Just imagine for a moment that you could actually take CONTROL of a door” as his inspiration, he created a game in which a murderous door gaily flings office workers to their deaths. Built with Unity and PlayMaker, it features AI, pathfinding, physics and at least one truly terrible pun. You can play Murdoor here.

At six o’clock on Sunday, everybody showed off what they’d made. The games made in Brighton included a text adventure about a pigeon, a baby-comforting simulator and a beautiful adventure game featuring a sinister kite. You can see all the Brighton games – and indeed the rest of the MolyJam games - here. It was, not to sound too sentimental here, really inspiring to see all that creativity and hard work and collaboration pay off.

Then we all went home to dream fitfully about code and swans and possible bugs. Or maybe that was just me.

The Brighton event couldn’t have happened without the awesome efforts of Edd Paris who organised the whole thing, Jo Summers who provided invaluable ground support, The Skiff who let us use their lovely venue and Relentless, our co-sponsors. Oh, and everyone who spent their really sunny weekend indoors, making ridiculous games, of course.

“What would Molydeux” image by Joe Kowalski