Back and bigger this year, the Sea Games Jam 2017 annual hackathon competition attracted 87 participants both local and international.

(L-R) Nicholas Sagau, Group General Manager of Media Prima Labs / Hasnul Hadi Samsudin, the Vice President of the Creative Content & Technologies Division of MDEC / Brian Recktenwal, game developer for Naughty Dog / Matthew Handrahan, Editor-in-Chief, GamesIndustry / Mohan Low, Head of Interactive Media, MDEC

If you think the who’s who in the caption above is long, wait till you see the list of international folks that flew over!

Hailing from Indonesia, Taiwan, Mauritius, Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, Yemen and much more made the trip over to spend 36 hours of non-stop planning, designing, creating, developing and hacking – all for the sake of passion. And a chance to win some money.

Brainstorming for that killer idea.

RM8,000 to be exact. While the second and third placed teams will walk away with RM5,000 and RM3,000, respectively.

Game jammers will also stand a chance to have their games picked by Media Prima Labs to get an extra investment funding of up to RM50,000 to further improve their demo product. They’ll also undergo mentoring in various areas such as game design, development, texturing, and how to market their games.

Nicholas Sagau giving the participants some pro-tips.

So how does it work? The participants are required to develop new game prototypes based on two of Media Prima’s successful products – Ejen Ali and the endearing Mak Cun.

Watch this space to find out who wins!