The global game Jam has started in Newport! Follow our adventures through the next 43 hours on the live stream above (I'm probably on the far left, in the hat, almost certainly doing something stupid), and via my Twitter feed. You can send us messages through Twitter too! And we'll read them!

If you're working hard at another jam site, good luck and have fun!

I'm going to be giving a guest lecture at the University of Wales, Newport this Friday afternoon, just before the Global Game Jam! Topics to be covered will include the basics of PHP and MySQL, getting XNA to play nicely with a web server, and building a basic global high-score system, with practical work setting up your own high-score server in one afternoon. Why not incorporate global high-scores into your GGJ entry this year?

If you're a Newport games student, come along and listen to my network-based ramblings! If you can't come along and if there's enough interest, I'll also put up an abridged version as a tutorial on davecheesefish Games sometime in the next couple of weeks.

This weekend, there are no less than THREE indie game jams going on simultaneously, and guess what? I'll be doing my darndest to enter all three.

This week sees the Experimental Gameplay Project (1-31 Dec, theme: "Drawing"), Game Prototype Challenge (13-20 Dec, theme: "Immortality" and "Thin Ice") and Ludum Dare 19 (18-20 Dec GMT, unknown theme) coinciding in the same 48-hour period. Making one game to fit all of them in two days can't be that hard, can it?

Credit to Chris Kaitila (Breakdance McFunkyPants) for getting this idea into my head. If I die during this, it's his fault!