Indie Game Jam III being held this weekend

For almost seven years now, Queens of the Stone Age front man Joshua Homme has been organizing unique jam sessions with a plethora of different big name musicians out in the high desert town of Joshua Tree, California. The sessions are designed to create new, highly experimental forms of music, and the results of these bizarre musical experimentations can be found on a series of albums, titled The Desert Sessions. While one might think that this type of unique jamming could only be unique to the music industry, as it turns out, one would be wrong.

2004 marks the third installment of the Indie Game Jam, an event that is set to take place in Oakland, California, this weekend. Over a four-day span, 20 developers from big name studios, such as Maxis, Ion Storm, Oddworld Inhabitants, and GameLab, as well as several independent development houses will collaborate to create, quite literally, dozens of games. The event setup is simple: Each year, the participants in the Jam are given a custom game engine (independently developed by one of the participants for free), with a singular technology focus. They will then use this technology to produce as many games as possible over the four-day event, often working all through the night to make their ideas happen.

"As mainstream games get bigger and more expensive to develop, it's harder and harder to make wacky experimental games," says Chris Hecker, one of the founders. "We started the Indie Game Jam to give developers an opportunity to experiment with interesting and new game designs free from commercial constraints." The organizers also want others to follow suit. "Hopefully we'll inspire other developers to try their own Game Jams, and maybe we'll even push the boundaries of the art form and motivate the industry to take more risks," says Sean Barrett, another founder.

"The way the industry is structured these days can make it hard to stay inspired," says Atman Binstock, an attendee and the supplier of the engine this year’s Jammers will use. "Participating in last year’s Indie Game Jam made me love making games again, and I think more events like this could really help rejuvenate the industry."

The completed projects from the Jam will be displayed at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at next week's Game Developers Conference (GDC) and online at the Indie Game Jam Web site. The code is released on SourceForge under the GNU General Public License, so other developers can freely experiment with the engine source code and games.