Interview: Clickteam's Chris Carson About Their Upcoming Game Jam

I recently got the chance to interview Clickteam’s Chris Carson about the company’s upcoming “Weirder Stuff” game jam and month long contest. As I previously covered late last week the Weirder Stuff game jam + month long contest is aimed around providing developers and aspiring developers a chance to show off their creative talents using Clickteam’s range of “visual programming” techniques or as Chris so aptly put it when I interviewed him last March at GDC “programming for the rest of us”.

Alongside showcasing some of the communities best creative minds Clickteam is also giving away some prizes for the best entries including licenses for the professional version of Clickteam Fusion 2.5, an Xbox One console and Android Tablets from ACER. On October 1st the company will also be giving its community their first extended look at Clickteam Fusion 3.0 – which is not an incremental update but rather a complete re-write using the company’s innovative Event Editor philosophy.

What follows is our discussion of the Weirder Stuff campaign, Fusion 3 and the future of Documentation & Tutorials for Clickteam’s products!

Broken Joysticks: The ‘Weirder Stuff’ Month Long Contest & Game Jam are going to give developers the chance to create some really spooktastic fun just in time for Halloween. Do you think that this will be the perfect time for developers to connect with one another?

Chris: As you know Rae, Clickteam is lucky to have a pretty awesome community. We just hope that Weirder Stuff and future events like it which we hope to host more often will help continue to foster that community and grow it. At least for my personal part being included in the community for 16 years now has been one of my greatest joys!

Broken Joysticks: We’ve seen a example game built with Clickteam Fusion 3.0 that will demonstrate features like sprite scaling and a dynamic 2D camera system. How will these features enable creators to bring new technical magic to their titles?

Chris: Fusion 3 is still a 2D game creation software but we are constantly pushing the boundaries. We always try to remove limitation while keeping things simple. With that philosophy we have added some features that allow you to control more things. We are still focusing on 2D games gameplay-wise – but visually we can now push some things into the third dimension. As we begin to show more of what Fusion 3 will be capable of the one thing we want to make sure we drive home is it will all still at its core be based in the “Event Editor” methodology of coding that we are famous for. So an existing user will have no problem wielding all the new power we will be providing in Fusion 3 to you!

Broken Joysticks: The in-person game jam portion of the ‘Weirder Stuff’ campaign has some awesome prizes – Exporters & dev software from Clickteam, An Xbox console from Microsoft and even tablets from Acer. Do you hope that these prizes may result in some fantastic software produced with Fusion? Had these sponsor worked with Clickteam’s before you approached them for this particular campaign?

Chris: As we have grown as a tool and as our users have grown into professional developers who are still deploying Fusion in their projects we have been able to reach out to some of the larger companies and make connections. The UWP exporter is a direct result of that. It was natural to invite our new friends to participate in the upcoming events in October.

Broken Joysticks: Any huge revelations or surprises you’d like to tease as we approach the September 27th kick off?

Chris: We have a lot of exciting announcements coming up but one thing I can drop on you is that Documentation issues will soon be a thing of the past! We will be launching a new library system to bring together documents and tutorials all in one place. Finding what you need when you are learning or problem solving can be difficult, we’re confident with this new resource that users will be able to accelerate through the learning curve even faster than ever!

Interview: Clickteam’s Chris Carson About Their Upcoming Game Jam