Every so often, the Level Ex team hosts a Game Jam. This is where the entire company breaks into small teams, and over the course of ~48 hours, builds a playable game prototype from scratch.
Sometimes, these game jams have themes, like the one we did in memory of one of our colleagues who died suddenly from a neuroendocrine tumor.
In this particular case, the game jam had no specific theme – the only rule was that the game had to be medical in nature. You can read a writeup of the game jam here.
Sometimes game jams allow for games to be designed beforehand. One team took the GDD for the diabetes game and sought out to prove an important thesis in that 48-hour “jam”:
Can glucose curves be realistically simulated using a particle system? In other words, if you just treat glucose as particles that float around in a medium (like interstitial fluid or blood), and are removed by ‘cells’ that are ‘activated’ by insulin, do the resulting glucose curves behave realistically?
Not only did the Game Jam prove that they could, we actually walked out with a pretty fun game prototype in our hands…
