I recently went to a local Game Jam. What's a game jam? I'd describe it as an event where people meet and come together to attempt to prototype an innovative game idea, fiting a common theme, and then share their results, no matter how embarrassingly incomplete, with others. All within a few hours.
Here's what I wanted to get out of it, from most important to least important:
- Meet cool people. I program at home and with coworkers all the time; this is a chance to meet others.
- Work together. I can work by myself any day.
- Fit a theme. I can follow my own ideas any day.
- Prototype a mechanic or idea. Because doing something boring is boring.
- See something cool. It can be really inspiring to see something created in such a short time.
- Show something cool. I need to share what I come up with more often.
- Make a game. Another thing I can do on my own time.
- Network/connect. If it happens, it happens; if not, I'm fine without it.
I'm sure everyone has their own criteria and there's probably someone with the exact opposite list writing a blog post right now about how they went to a game jam and ran into someone who spent all his time socializing and coding and didn't even bring business cards to hand out.
I certainly met some cool people, saw some really neat games, and even got a few business cards from other local developers and artists. The other things? Well... maybe next time. I was looking at the team I was on and the other teams and it seems like there's three things you need to do to accomplish the things on my list:
- Pick an acceptable team
- Pick an acceptable idea
- Contribute
Notice I said "acceptable" team and idea. Not even "great", not even "good", just acceptable. You only have a few hours and everyone there will be quite impressed if your game is a slight variation of "avoid the red squares and collide with the green squares."
If those three things can make a gam jam experience good, then I suppose the opposite would probably lead to a less fun time:
- Actively break up the team
- Push or accept an idea that totaly misses the point of a game jam
- Contribute nothing but your dumb idea
Yup, those were the three things I ran into. I suppose I should have stepped up and tried to keep the team together, make sure we we're doing something worth doing, and make sure everyone had something to do. So, if you're the proactive type of person, the three things you really need to do to prevent someone from sabotaging your efforts to accomplish the things on my list are:
- Pick (and maintain) an acceptable team
- Pick (and maintain) an acceptable idea
- Contribute (and help others)
Here's another list of random observations:
- UnityScript sucks. Not thoroughly statically typed, not thoroughly dynamically typed. If you have to explicitly cast every time you get something from an array then your language has the worst of both worlds. And that's the easy way. I had to sum an array of floats and since floats are primitive, I couldn't cast them. I looked online for about 15 minutes and in the end, I had to convert the object to a string then parse it as a float.
- Pick a team you can quickly get started with. When you only have 6 hours you don't want to spend the first 2.5 hours downloading and setting up Unity and Dropbox.
- Teams that stick to the spirit of game jam do better than people sitting near each other half-working toward a dumb idea.
- Dropbox sharing made integration easy but also more painful: you constantly get updates in the background but when someone is stuck on a compiler error or obvious bug, everyone knows within thirty seconds. Ultimately, instant feedback, and help from others, was a better way of maintaining progress on such a short iteration.
- Control-z is good enough version control if you're only programming for one session.
- Unity may be better for weeklong or monthlong jams, but not good at all for 6 hour jams. The best games used Flixel.
- Working in teams would be better without all the other people. I really hate to say it but I've never been a fan of teamwork and it rarely works out. Sometimes it does, but the end results are mostly beyond my influence and usually disappointing. It always reminds me of high school group projects.
- Whatever you create is going to be buggy and incomplete and almost certainly not even fun. That's ok. Everyone there is in the same situation and we're all there to have a good time. There was definitely an air of cooperation and support. It was fun and strangely adventurous to see what so many small groups of people could come up with under such constraints.
