BlazeJam 2012 48-Hour Charity Game Jam and Auction

If you haven’t heard, Colorado is having a lot of trouble in the wildfire department. As of this article, close to 150,000 acres have been burned, more than 600 homes have been destroyed and there have been at least five known fatalities. The worst part is that it’s only going to get worse from here because there are so many fires and only so many firefighters to try to contain them.

The worst fire so far this year—not to mention in Colorado history—is that of Waldo Canyon. As of this article, 18,247 acres have been burned and over 346 homes destroyed there alone.

Our own Cody Crouch, a Colorado resident and helicopter photojournalist, has been flying over the fires since the beginning and has seen first-hand the havoc these wildfires have been wreaking across the state.

“The amount of devastation is heartbreaking, but seeing the community pull together like they have is inspirational,” he said on Friday.

One example of this “pulling together” is Colorado-based game developer Cerulean Games. Hearing about the victims of the wildfires, the people over at Cerulean Games—particularly CEO Dave Calabrese—decided to help. Thus was born BlazeJam 2012, a 48-hour game development challenge and seven-day auction to benefit the Northern Colorado American Red Cross, the Pikes Peak American Red Cross, and the Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado.

The game development challenge, or “game jam”, will run from 6:00 pm MDT Friday, July 6 to 6:00 pm MDT Sunday, July 8. Cerulean games–along with seven other development teams and about thirty individual indie developers–will be in downtown Denver donating their time and skills to create games that follow an appropriate theme—Fire Fighting. At the end of the 48 hour period, the games will be sold as a charity bundle and the proceeds from them will go to the featured charities.

The auction–running from 8:00 am MDT on Saturday, July 7 to 8:00 pm MDT Saturday, July 14–is all online and includes an impressive list of gaming-related items, including:

5 – 12 month Xbox Live Gold Memberships (Donated by Rogue 6 Studios)
5 – XBLA Game Packs (Castle Crashers, Castlevania SOTN, Earthworm Jim HD, Fez, Ilomilo, Iron Brigade, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Plants Vs Zombies, Rocketbowl, Scott Pilgrim, Skullgirls, Splosion Man, Super Meat Boy, Trine 2, Bastion) (Donated by Rogue 6 Studios)
1 – Sega/Sonic the Hedgehod Lighted Store Sign (Donated by Chuck Bartowski)
1 – Fine Art Print – ‘The Walk of Life’ by Aldana Zanetta (Donated by Aldana Zanetta)
1 – Fine Art Print – ‘Treehouse’ by Aldana Zanetta (Donated by Aldana Zanetta)
7 – Indie Sunburn Game Engine License (Donated by Synapse Gaming)
3 – Professional Sunburn Game Engine License (Donated by Synapse Gaming)
1 – Full Suite Unity Game Engine License (Unity Pro, Android Pro, iOS Pro, and Team License) (Donated by Unity Technologies)
100 – Steam Download Keys for Hacker Evolution Duality (Donated by Exosyphen Studios)
1 – NCAA Football 13 for Xbox 360 (Donated by Terry Terrones)

They are also accepting donations throughout the entire event. Donating $5 USD automatically gets you copies of all games produced during the game jam. You will also receive free copies of the games if you win any of the auctions.

So head over to the BlazeJam website and help out Cerulean Games and the other developers help the people of Colorado.

Statistics gathered from InciWeb and 9news.com.