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A game jam is an event (usually over a weekend) where programmers, artists, designers, and musicians assemble to conceive of an idea for a game and then create it before the jam concludes. The end result is a bevy of innovative games that are both compact and creative. My first game jam was Global Game Jam 2013 at MIT. Global Game Jam is an annual jam at which a central theme is provided to which all games created must have a connection. The 2013 jam wasn’t the best experience for a variety of reasons, but I remained interested in the 48-hour game-creation fests all the same. As with the game industry dream, life interfered with my game development aspirations for a long time as I moved to St. Louis, maintained the blog, and started GM’ing my tabletop campaign. One year after my first jam, I refused stall any longer and went to another: Global Game Jam 2014 at the University of Missouri in St. Louis.
2014′s GGJ was an absolute blast. I learned a lot, met new people, and, most importantly, I helped make a real game.
Here’s how it all went down.
Global Game Jam 2014 began on a Friday afternoon. After work I drove to UMSL’s campus, which is not far from my house. Upon arrival I noticed the first big difference between the MIT and UMSL Game Jams: UMSL’s “hub room”. At MIT, everyone was shepherded into a single auditorium at the beginning of the jam where we waited for theme announcements. Only afterwards were we moved to different rooms where we could brainstorm (and eventually work on) our game concepts with the other participants. At UMSL, there was one large room where everyone who could fit in the space set up their various towers, tablets, and keyboards before the jam officially began. It made the first hour of the jam very social. From the start people wandered about to complete prize-winning “get to know you” activities or played stuff on the computers they brought (as such, I highly recommend Samurai Gunn if you regularly have friends around for game nights). This was a much better introduction to the game-making community than the one at MIT. Instead of looking at people in an auditorium, I interacted with my fellow game makers via the media that brought us all together in the first place. Plus, I loved the “everyone working in one place” atmosphere in St. Louis far more than the “spread out in separate rooms” setup in Cambridge.
After this encouraging introduction we all moved to a lecture hall for the opening keynotes and theme reveal. This was a more familiar part of GGJ, so I waited patiently for the advice of the speakers and the unveiling of the theme. While I can’t recall the lessons from 2013, there was a lot of worthwhile tidbits in 2014′s speeches, including the challenge to create something wholly new, the entreaty to share who you are with your games, the recommendation to not take the theme too literally, and the suggestion to make the games as simple as possible. When the keynotes concluded, the theme was revealed: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” I immediately started crafting ideas, but I also expected to have 30 minutes or so to refine them. Instead, everyone in the auditorium gathered into small groups for a quick 15-minute brainstorming session. I felt like last year’s process generated more interesting concepts, but since St. Louis’s was the 15th largest Game Jam site in the world, I understand the need for efficiency. In the end, there were a lot of cool ideas, but only a few that were solid enough to be pitched to the whole group. Unlike last year, I didn’t come up with anything I wanted to pursue, so I sat down to listen for an idea that I’d enjoy working on.
After 2013′s game jam, I expected a lot of great ideas to be pitched after the brainstorming session, and GGJ 2014 did not disappoint. Admittedly, I can’t remember them all now, but there were a lot of good concepts. Some particularly memorable highlights included the “masochistic pinata,” the “Calvin-and-Hobbes-esque” imagination puzzle game, and the Dungeon Flip board and video game. Yet it was the final idea that truly caught my attention: a game in which the player was an AI in a video game, charged with providing your game’s “player” with enough challenge to keep them invested, but not so much that they rage quit. At the end of the presentations, I asked the idea’s creator more about his concept, and when others came to join the conversation, a group formed. We had a good spread of talent too: 5 programmers, 2 artists, and a musician. With us all working in tandem, we believed we could make the AI-dea into an awesome game.
Our team made decisions about the game’s overall design, art direction, and core technologies as Friday wound to a close. We knew that we wanted to be looking directly at the “player of the AI’s game” (who we’d come to call “the adversary”) to build on our interpretation of the theme: seeing a gamer from the perspective of their hobby. Though we knew little else about how the game would work, that idea meant that the artists could start on creating our “adversary” character. We also knew that we wanted a Tron-like theme to represent the game’s “innards” where the AI character lived, giving our musician an idea of the kind of music to write. With that completed, the only remaining conceptual work was for the programmers. Before we started real work, we needed to refine the gameplay mechanics and decide upon a programming language. Since it was getting late, we decided to tackle the easier question first: what did we want to use to make this game? A lot of people on the team were interested in learning Unity, a popular game-making application, so we started watching Unity tutorials and assumed that game mechanics would emerge as we implemented the base elements of the game.
Unfortunately, Unity is rather intimidating to beginners like me. Without someone to show you the ropes, it is difficult to comprehend how to navigate the windows, much less how to create a game using its GUI-based object creation and behavior-specifying scripts. After starting a few tutorials, I wasn’t feeling very hopeful about how much I could contribute to the project. Since no one was a Unity master, I imagined that this game jam would also be a bust. I feared that I wouldn’t learn much and that the project would slowly become less and less interesting, just like last year. Feeling a bit defeated, I went home. Though the Game Jam site was open for the entirety of the 48-hour period, I learned from the previous year how exhausting the stressful parts of the jam can become. As such, I’d resolved not to spend 24 hours there and went back to my own bed to rest instead. Of course, some of our group continue to work overnight, so my absence did not halt our progress.
Due to the efforts of those who’d coded into the wee hours of the morning, I returned on Saturday to find that some of the base elements of the game had already been prototyped. This was exactly the encouragement I needed to get psyched about the game again and the example I needed to start working well with Unity. Other than that, there’s very little about the Saturday of a game jam to discuss. It’s just work, work, work, work, and more work because your game isn’t done yet. In fact, games are only finished on Saturday if you have a clear concept and the right team. My team was the right team. Everyone knew what they wanted to work on and contributed important parts to the game. I created on buttons for the monsters the AI would throw at the adversary, as well as the conditional scripts that showed when the adversary was happy, angry, or bored. Unlike last year, which was a constant rush to get things done, I was able to relax and enjoy myself when I completed something. With a few breaks, I was always ready to jump back into coding. Slowly but surely we pushed through the day, finally getting our game to a working, if unpolished, state before Sunday. I’d heard rumors that this could be accomplished, but I never suspected a team I was on could pull it off. It certainly helped that I became more and more comfortable using Unity throughout the day, allowing me to develop far more quickly than I’d anticipated. Even when group members butted heads about concepts or code usage, the team worked really well together, which made the most important day of the jam a huge success. When I went home that night, I was super excited to put the final touches on the game in the morning.
After such a productive Saturday, Sunday was a breeze. It was just so nice to enjoy the final day of the game jam rather than going crazy to finish up. We weren’t running on all cylinders to push out a barely-functional demo. Instead we made subtle improvements on the game’s design (mostly the difficulty), visuals, and other optional pieces. For example, I setup a score screen that made success in the game more trackable than mere guesswork. When I wasn’t coding, I got to relax some more, chat with my teammates, and wander around the hub room to check out the state of all the games. Many looked like they’d seen success similar to ours, even though their games looked completely different. I wouldn’t have been able to interact with anyone during their final stages if I’d had my face glued to my computer in the jam’s final hours, so I’m glad we avoided that fate. Though our game was uploaded to the site at the very last minute (and possibly improperly, considering the issues I’ve had with it since), it was because we wanted to fill it with as much extra content as we could.
The final part of the event was the presentation of the games to the jam’s attendees (and other interested parties). Last year I was embarrassed about my group’s presentation (also our “game” overall), but I could not have been more excited to show off my new game to my fellow gamers and creators. In the end, we decided to call the game Artful Intelligence, and our unveiling and demo could not have been more flawless. Our audience laughed at the right parts and admired the entertaining and valuable elements of the title. Yet, most importantly, we finished a game. I finished a game. Something to play and admire and put on my resume. Our success put me in a good mood through the rest of the presentations, most of which were extremely entertaining. There were a few duds, but, as I know well, not everything goes smoothly at a jam. Instead of describing them all, I’ll just list and link the ones I really liked, so anyone can check them out.
- Masochistic Pinata
- Tricolor Saga... With Candy!
- Tickle the Pig
- A Paper Tale
- Dungeon Flip
- Torso Demon Saga
- Perception Ward
- Saga of the Dragon's Horde
- Imagine That!
- Race the Rainbow!
My second game jam was very fun and very educational, which is exactly what I wanted. After last year, I think another mediocre weekend would’ve turned me off to game jams, so I’m super pleased that this one worked out how I hoped it would. It proved that I could make a game, even when I had very little experience doing so. All that it required were the right people and the right attitudes. Hopefully I’ll be lucky enough to stumble into another project like Artful Intelligence at the upcoming St. Louis Game Jam this April, but until then I’m happy that GGJ2014 was as good as game jams get.
You can read this story and many more at the N3rd Dimension.
