(Saturday, January 28th, mid-way through the 48-hour event)

Dinesh and UMSL had kindly provided several dozen boxes of doughnuts for the morning, which was a nice way to start the day. Many folks were there right on the dot, and other trickled in over the next few hours (I don’t blame anyone for wanting to get a full night of sleep!). Sandwiches arrived on-time, and there seemed to be enough for everybody, which was a relief, though I also noticed that we were starting to run low on soda. The Webster Video Game Club had brought dozens of 2-liter bottles, but as with the pizza, people were going through the supplies fast, so we sent out a few resupply missions. Over the entire weekend, our group of 95 jammers went through 107 two-liter bottles of soda, seven cases of water, six bags of ice, and gallons of coffee.
On Saturday afternoon, I went around and checked how all the teams were doing, and some of the games were already breathtaking. I was especially impressed by “From the Ashes”, with an exquisite phoenix, and a very emotionally powerful descent through rotating rings of scenery into the center of the planet. The “Obelisk” game also had a very impressive 3-D environment setup. In fact, every single game already had some sort of a basic prototype in place, which was pretty amazing for less than 24 hours of work!

We also had the video crew come through several times, another report for one of the UMSL papers, and both the Dean and the Chancellor stopped by at some point. We were also showing a map of the world on screens in both rooms, with pins showing all the other hundreds of jam sites around the world, as part of this massive global event!

Also on Saturday we had some new jammers arrive. Some were there for the duration, and some were just popping in to see what was going on.