About the project
The JAMR Game labs is something I’ve wanted to build for some time. I imagined a place where we could build and test fun games as a community. For the JAMR team, everything we do is rooted in bringing people together to have fun.
We love telling stories, and we love building games. We also apparently love building games based on our stories. JAMR games exist because they’re games we want to play, and we want to see as many people as possible playing them with us.
Getting physical copies on the shelf can be costly, especially for a small LLC, so I wanted to build something to bridge that gap. The Game Labs would be a place were we get to experiment with new ideas and play test mechanics with our followers.
Imagine a platform where players could toggle between rule variations with a button and vote on which one they liked best, or a system that would let us offer new expansions to testers without waiting for physical print runs to be delivered.
This is a playground.
The hard copy promise
JAMR is still going to publish physical games. It’s something that’s really important to us. We love video games, but we want our games in your hands in the literal sense of the word. It’s also the reason that I don’t intend to add online multiplayer to the platform.
We’ll have some games with “pass & play” support, and I’m developing AI opponents for titles that support multiple players, but we want true multiplayer to be an in-person experience.
The artificial elephant in the room
I’m working with an AI agent to build this project. I know that’s a hot button issue, especially among creative communities, so I want to get out ahead of it and be transparent about how I’m using it.
I’m not using AI for asset or content generation. It’s strictly for coding, and that’s actually part of the experiment.
AI assisted coding doesn’t make me a better software engineer. It makes me faster. I can assign a task to the agent in the morning before I start working for the day and review the output over lunch. Then, I can either request changes or move on to the next task.
Software engineers have had “intelligent” tools for years. AI coding agents are basically more robust code completion tools with larger context windows. I don’t think AI is going away, so I want to be able to leverage it effectively.
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