Global Game Jam 2011

…yeah, not the fruit-based kind of jam. S-sorry?

The Global Game Jam is an annual event, wherein thousands of people get together in various locations around the world and make games in 48 hours. Game jams are amazing, and I was very easily talked into participating in this one as a roving producer. While that means I don’t have a game to show off, I do have a lot of observations about design, teams, and so on from working closely with seven teams at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab during the GGJ. So in no particular order…

1) Be honest about your time limit
There is a near-universal “thing” about people – they’re bad at estimating how long it’ll take to do something. This trait expresses very powerfully in programmers. This is one of the many ways in which game jams are awesome – what’s normally scoped in days or weeks is by necessity discussed in hours, and decent programmers know what can and can’t be done in an hour. But there will come a point when someone gets this look in their eye like they think they’re goddamn Neo in The Matrix and they can do everything. Multiple custom-designed levels. Playable character customization. Whatever…at some point, someone is going to completely lose sight of the time constraints for development and try to pack the game with new features instead of polishing the second-to-second gameplay. Don’t let that person be you.

2) Be honest about your skill set
If you’re coming to a game jam without any of the skills typically needed to make a game (coding, artwork, sound design, music, UI, etc), that is okay! I don’t have any of those skills either! Instead I contributed the skill set I have (project management) to the teams that wanted to use it. There were also multiple people at our site that were working on physical games (one with ice, which was very cold to playtest), which obviously don’t require you to have strong video game-making skills. There were people on site just to help oversee the jam, from food delivery to cleanup to rearranging furniture. I feel confident that pretty much every team could have used a good playtester to come through and try various features as they were being developed. There are lots ways that you can participate, and I would encourage anyone local who’s curious but unsure to check out Boston Game Jams and come out for the next local jam.

3) Realize that this is supposed to be fun
Game jams are the kind of thing I wish more industries would/could do – it’s like a safe, tiny version of the stresses the actual career will put on you. It simulates crunch conditions, but only for a couple of days. (Also, if you’re jamming somewhere like GAMBIT, quality of life guidelines are enforced, and the site closes at midnight. As I’ve never seen code written at 4am actually turn out elegantly or even successfully, I appreciated the site kicking everyone out and encouraging them to go home and get some sleep.) You’re working in small, fast, self-directed teams with clear goals and deadlines. If that is not at least a little bit fun for you, then I’m not sure how much fun you’d have making games professionally. Granted, if you start your own company, you can set your own rules about how your products are developed; however, unless you work entirely alone and don’t give yourself any deadlines, you’re going to eventually need to work with others and under some kind of constraints. (Also, people working entirely alone without deadlines often fail to actually release anything.) If being in a driven, creative team in a high-pressure environment doesn’t make you go, “at last I have found my people!” then maaaaaybe (that kind of) game development isn’t your bag.

4) The final 10% of your project will take 30% of your time
No, really. NO. REALLY. This often goes hand in hand with the I Am A Golden God head-trip I talk about in #1. At one point toward the end of Saturday, someone who shall remain nameless walked up to me with the most deranged look on their face and tried to tell me that their team’s game was already totally done, and that they just had, “a couple things” to fix. I said, “the final 10% of a project takes 30% of the time,” and they blew me off. The team started adding features, since they had all this “extra” time. Did most of the features go in? Yes. Was the game full of bugs? Yes. And that’s fine, assuming the team will keep working on the game. I tend to prefer the, “fewer features executed well,” approach – but not everyone does. But for me, things like controls and character animations need to come before extra bells and whistles. Testing on different browsers needs to happen. The “boring” stuff that you shoved until the end because a part of you knew it was tedious and time-consuming? Yeah, that 10% doesn’t take 10% of your time to finish. It’s ⅓ of your project. Taking the time to actually do it can lift your game from, “Yeah, I can tell this was made in two days,” to “Wow this is awesome! …Huh, it was made in two days, you say?”

5) Scope appropriately
Building off of #4, it’s much easier to get all that “bothersome” testing, polishing, and bug-fixing out of the way if you complete your code by the end of Saturday. That’s all features, all assets, everything in the game in place and working to some degree. That gives you all of Sunday to grab people and test, to adjust motions and animations, to do a quick last-minute swap-out of a particular sound, to make sure the music syncs up how you want it to, to tweak the game physics…fixing all the stuff that is going to prevent someone from forwarding your game on to their friends after they’ve played it themselves. Again: if your team keeps working on the game after the jam, this is less of an issue. But if you’re going to obey the constraints of the jam and actually try and make a complete game, then make it complete. If that means the game is short, so what. If it’s just a very simple concept, so what. I like people who can demonstrate that they know how to actually finish things, personally. And the way to actually finish a game is to start with a game that’s actually possible to complete in two days. Cut features. Cut more features. Consider designing a game that can be scaled down, with rings of features added if time permits.

6) Tell people what you’re doing
I didn’t realize it until it was well into Sunday, but I could have basically predicted which teams would complete their games and which wouldn’t just based on how loud the team was. People talking, announcing what they were doing, calling out when they finished an asset or merged some code or verified that a feature worked or logged a bug or…you get the idea. Busy, actively communicating teams – these were the teams that managed to kick some good-looking shit out the door. Not perfect, but definitely not games with, “well, we WANTED to do…” or “we were PLANNING on…” caveats. Games that actually hit their objectives and were playable – those games came from teams that talked to each other, constantly. This makes sense because again, you have HOURS not WEEKS, so you can’t afford to just assume that someone else is going to notice your piece is done and they can get started on the next step. Some rooms were dead silent, with everyone in their corners wearing headphones. I get that – programming requires focus and silence sometimes. But I’m not sure how well that dovetails with the incredibly fast pace required to get a game assembled in two days. Everyone quietly making their assets or pieces off on their own means that you’re not checking in all along the way to make sure those pieces will actually fit together.

7) Make a game
One of the teams told me at the end of Saturday, “Oh, well we’re doing great. We have all our assets, so we just need to put them together and get them to play!” Just…sit with that for a second. That was a whole new level of bullshit I’d never encountered before. It’s basically saying, “all we have to do is make the game playable and then we can play it!” I mean, yeah. The way you make a game is to make one, if that’s how you want to put it. That’s…kind of the point of the jam. So why would you leave the “make the game” part until Sunday? Otherwise it’s just a pile of art assets and some bits of code, yo.

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So yes, that was my first Global Game Jam! It was exhausting and wonderful and I can’t wait until next year’s.