Yesterday, the game developers community talked about GAME_JAM, a failed reality TV show about game jams. It fell apart for a variety of reasons, all better explained by the links in this article. This blog describes my part of the story, a minor part as I perceived it from the periphery, and includes some important advice on how to deal with contracts as an independent developer later on.

As any terrible legal story starts, this one starts not much longer than a week ago.

It's the third day of the Game Developers Conference, almost two weeks ago when I'm posting this. A bunch of independent developers are sitting in a local restaurant having a meal, and one of them is mentioning a contract that they're unsure about. The contract is for something called GAME_JAM. I had been told about the idea: a Polaris-run reality show about game jams, an exciting venture for everybody involved. Not only will it help demystify development a bit more, it will expose the massive audiences of Polaris to an important part of game dev culture. It's an exciting idea, and like Amnesia Fortnight or Super Game Jam, GAME_JAM has tremendous potential to do good for our scene.