Global Game Jam Timer

The Global Game Jam starts in one Week. I made this useful app and I wanted to share with others also participating. It’s a Flash-based timer application!

This is the longest weekend of my life.

We are going to project it on a wall so every participant knows how much time they have left. It shows hours, minutes, seconds and centiseconds left until the Global Game Jam is over. It also shows a percentage bar. When the time stars running out, it will flash in a dramatic fashion. As an added bonus, it also connects to Twitter and displays the most recent tweet with the #GGJ2011#GGJ11 hashtag beneath the timer (update: changed to the official hashtag).

Get it here!

The app is customizable so it can be used at different venues. It can be even used for other 48 hour events, such as Ludum Dare.

Installation: Just unpack everything in a folder. Run ggjTimer.swf. If you can’t, open it in a browser or Quicktime. Press Control + F for full screen. You might get a security message from Flash. It’s because the app is connecting to Twitter. Just follow the instructions to authorize web connections for this file. You can also ignore this step if you don’t care about the Twitter functionality.

Customization: To customize it, open the file ggjTimer.xml in any plain text editor.

The value “enddate” can be used to change the exact moment when your event should be over. It refers to the system clock of the computer running it.

The value “hashtag” can be used to change what tweets the timer will display. You can delete this line to disable the tweet function. Note: the app will not show any Tweets that start with @ or RT (the screenshot lies!).

Finally, “limit_to_48″ will limit the timer to 48 hours. If you put in “yes”, the maximum value the timer will show will be 48 hours, even if there is more than 48 hours left. Use this to have a dramatic start. Put in “no” if you want longer events for example.

Let me know if you have any troubles. I have coded it just today so it may have some kinks. If it does, I want to fix them before Global Game Jam starts. Finally, if you are going to use it, I would be delighted if you would make a photo and post it here!