As the invasion of Ukraine escalated, these devs found solace in a game jam

gamedeveloper.com:

"I could never imagine that at some point of my life, I would need to organize an [gaming] event when everything would be quite literally on fire," said co-founder of GDBAY Elena Lobova about working on a game jam just as Ukraine had been invaded by Russian forces in 2022.

At GDC 2023, Lobova spoke about her experiences working as a game dev in Ukraine, which was a growing field for upcoming creatives and developers. However, during the sudden and fierce invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Lobova and her colleagues at the GDBAY institution faced a tough choice—should they abandon their planned game development community event or stick with their plans to proceed with their annual event?

At the beginning of her panel, Lobova showed off a meme that joked about the reality of being an event planner. "Being an event planner is easy. It's like riding a bike. Except the bike is on fire, you're on fire, everything is on fire, and you're in hell," it read. Lobova also stated that she almost couldn't make it to her GDC talk due to passport issues stemming from her ordeal in 2022.

For Lobova and the collective of developers in Ukraine, the GDBAY organization—a 2400+ online community of global game industry professionals to communicate and plan events— and its Hyper Casual Game Jam was an event to hone their craft and lead to potential projects done the road. With the sudden invasion of Ukraine just days before the game jam, this unfortunately put the development team in a troubling and dangerous situation.

On the day that the event was set to begin, bombs had gone off in the early morning. During the panel, Lobova shared the DMs and text messages from team members about the first attacks near their homes. Throughout this