This is something I wrote in January 2014, I forgot about it for a while but I think it’s cool so I’m going to post it anyways. I hope this can help convince otherwise undecided people to come and join a game jam.
This year I decided to go to Montreal’s game jam after reading Noel Berry’s post-mortem on his entire development experience, really.
http://www.noelberry.ca/2012/07/years-of-game-development-adventures
I’m 16, and I loved the game jam. It started on a Friday evening and ended at 3PM on the Sunday of that week, which gave us more or less 48 hours to make a game.
Pre-jam
It was a bit awkward. I didn’t know anyone, but the food was great. Soon enough the game jam began and we all sat down in a classroom. We were roughly 150 people. Looking around, I could see beards twice the length of my hair. Thoughts like “Oh man, what am I doing here, I’m not even sure I can make a prototype in 48 hours!” started popping up and now I thought I had done a huge mistake. I was literally regretting the moment I clicked the “Register” button at the Montreal Game Jam website.
And so there I was sitting among what seemed to be seas of beards and seasoned developers. There was an introductory presentation followed by a few inspiring videos. Also the presenter asked how many people were attending their first game jam. To everyone’s surprise more than half the room raised their hand. Suddenly I felt a bit less anxious.
Now it was time to announce the theme. After a roaring drumroll, the theme hit us like a soccer ball right in the crotch (I know how that feels). It was “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”. Silence. People scratching their heads and saying “Yeah, that’s a tough one”. After a few minutes of brainstorm I still haven’t thought of anything interesting.
It was now time to create the teams. Some teams were already pre-made, but many people were single so to speak. The organizers randomly attributed numbers to form the teams. Participants had earlier been separated in accordance to their specialties so that teams would have an adequate mix of talents. There were 2D artists, 3D artists, sound designers, game designers, programmers, and probably some rarer specialties. By that time I was feeling bad for the guys who would end up with a 16 year old for a programmer. Luckily our team had more programmers, so I thought at least we could rely on them. We were mostly really shy, and the third programmer in our team, poor guy, tried to get us to brainstorm. I was desperately trying to come up with a concept, but I couldn’t find anything that had the right scope for a 48-hour project or that seemed fun enough. Eventually Carl, the third programmer, made contact with the other teams and we began a full-out multi-team brainstorming session. Ideas were plenty, but two main ones subsisted. From there we formed two teams out of the ones we already had. Everyone joined the team whose concept they liked the most.
Our team
Now the teams and the game concepts were decided. We were two programmers, two 2D artists, and a sound designer. I was one of the programmers. Our idea was to create an outer-space hair salon. It’s better than it sounds, and we evolved the concept well enough to make it fun.
Friday evening
The older programmer had 3 years of experience with Unity, so we decided to use that particular engine. I had never used Unity before, but I had read part of its docs. Still it was very alien to me. So I decided to make myself useful and write a level editor in AS3, the only actual game making tool I had used before. Our game was 2D, and Unity wasn’t being nice to us. The entire 2D dev process in Unity felt really hackish. At around two in the morning, our team got together, and because of all the Unity issues and the fact that our game concept didn’t appeal to us anymore, we came up with a new concept. It was something along the lines of a shared keyboard two-player 2D platformer racing troll-fest. Sounded good enough. The older programmer (to whom I will from now refer to as the programmer) began working on it with Unity. I tried my best to figure out how to make tileset-based maps in Unity, but nothing came of it. By that time I was seriously feeling that I was useless. It was around three and a half in the morning when I went to sleep. By the way I’ve heard of people who haven’t slept at all during the 48 hours. Crazy.
Saturday
I woke up early, before the programmer. I decided that since I had nothing to do, I could dish out a prototype using Flixel, fairly quickly. In a couple of hours I had written a decent prototype and the main classes. The advantage over Unity, I thought, was that it would allow us to use DAME for tile-based level editing. When the programmer woke up, he said that Unity was a pain in the ass and that he wanted to work on the Flixel prototype. In a couple of minutes he had learned Flixel and we made a GitHub repository. There he taught me how to merge using git. Before I really had no conception on how devs worked in teams, but now everything made sense. Merging was a piece of cake. The game was now advancing at a steady rhythm while we both worked on it.
Sunday
We were still working on the game. The problem was that we didn’t yet fully decide which mechanics to keep, which ones don’t work, and how to fix them. The jam was going to end at 3pm. By the time we got rid of the bugs and gave the game a rework in a coop direction, it was already very late, and we had nothing but three levels (two from the sound designer, and one from me). None of these levels had incredible level design since our game mechanics were fluctuating and changed somewhat overnight. This was our project’s main shortfall. The mechanics weren’t entirely fleshed out, and the level design was boring. Because we didn’t have time to design more levels, the competitive aspect of the game went to waste, with the coop part taking all the space. That being said, I’m actually very satisfied with the final result because we finished, it’s playable, and it shows its potential.
Meanwhile, at the artists’ department
I have more insight on the programming chapter of our game, but collaborating with artists was a very cool experience for me.
Our sound designer basically finished all sounds and soundtracks by Saturday, and made a set of sounds and tracks for another team. The music was awesome chiptune style loops that transitioned seamlessly, and even sounded badass when played simultaneously. Saturday evening he designed a couple of levels for us with DAME.
It was also the first time I had seen 2D artists at work. I thought at the beginning of the jam that animated spritesheets would be too long to draw. Well, they drew six of those, a tilemap, five icons, progress bars, three splashcreens, a full parallax background, and more stuff we didn’t even have time to include. The quality and the quantity of the artwork were well over what I was hoping for, and it’s an entirely different feeling when using custom-made art than when getting some from opengameart.com and such. It also gives the game a huge part of its identity and sets the atmosphere.
A note about the spirit
I’m currently in high school, where being a dick is still considered cool, so I found that the game jam’s atmosphere was another dimension entirely. I have never seen a place so full with good intent. Like, literally, I don’t know if the adult world is usually that nice, but the place was full of respect, humour, openness, and overall coolness.
What I learned for next year’s jam
First off, I need to have more fun. Since this was my first jam, I was too shy and nervous. Nobody should be shy and nervous. There’s so much more fun to get from talking to other game makers and from celebrating the Global Game Jam that it’s not worth it to stay in your own bubble.
Also, mechanics are really important (in my opinion the most important element of a game). In a game jam, good graphics receive praise, good music receives praise, but good mechanics make a great game. In a 48-hour period nobody expects the devs to come up with a polished product. What’s really being judged are mechanics, because that’s how you can judge an unfinished game: art assets are going to evolve of course, but the core mechanics will stay the same (unless the team overhauls their initial concepts). They show the potential of the game, and mechanics is essentially the “fun factor”.
As you can see mechanics matter a lot. During a game jam it’s crucial to have a solid, coherent view of mechanics, otherwise the game will be a jumble of half-fleshed-out gameplay elements, which is what happened with our game. I still like it, but we should have brainstormed the gameplay properly instead of just saying “oh well this will be the trolliest game of all time”.
Finally, don’t be overly anxious about “am I fit for a game jam or not”. If I survived, you should too. Game jams encompass people of any level of experience. In fact, even people with no gamedev experience at all can come in handy. I wished many times that one of my friends could be with us at the jam to critique our game and help us flesh out the mechanics.
Last but not least, our contest entry: https://globalgamejam.org/2014/games/no-i-team