EPT
The most recent St. Louis Game Jam was two weeks ago, and it was much different than January’s Global Game Jam. For one thing, it wasn’t a “Global Game Jam” event, so it was comparatively small and not as strictly structured. Furthermore, I decided that I’d focus on game design rather than programming this time around. Instead of a video game, I wanted to create a tabletop game of some kind (especially if it involved cards). The organizers of this jam also attempted to try out a new kind of theme for the game jam. Since the theme is the most important part of a game jam, the changes made for a significantly different creative experience than I’d had at previous events. Finally, this jam was the first jam I’d attended with a large student presence, many of whom were students of the jam’s organizer, a Webster College game development teacher. All these factors combined to make a game jam which I enjoyed but still found a bit odd and frustrating.
I arrived at the game jam on Friday evening to sign in and mingle with the other game makers. The St. Louis game development scene is surprisingly large (the St. Louis GGJ 2014 was the 4th largest in the US), but I did not expect a huge turnout at a mid-year regional game jam. However, there were a ton of people at Webster when I arrived, some of whom I’d seen at previous jams but many more that I’d never met. This growing interest in game creation (especially in St. Louis) really excites me and encourages me to do it more often. I also found it cool that there were so many Webster students in attendance, at least at first. In the end, the number of participants that attended the jam was double the expected number, which was awesome except when it meant some people couldn’t get meals or swag. With not much to do until the theme reveal, I mingled, talked to a few people, and failed (once again) to get a T-shirt in my size.
An hour later, the jam attendees moved into an auditorium to learn about the jam’s format. While much of the event’s minutia were familiar, the team creation and "the theme" were unconventional. In an attempt to shake up the standard game jam format, the organizers of this jam asked teams form based on mutual interests, after which they would be assigned a theme that was randomly generated (and very silly). As much as I respected this choice to innovate, this change was a step down from the regular format. The plus side was that there were many fun and unique “themes” and that people were forced to interact a lot before the theme was announced. However, the adjustment removed two of my favorite ingredients in any game jam: the unique interpretations of the unifying theme and the opportunity for participants to form groups based on their commitment to an idea they love. I love looking at (or playing) game jam games and trying to understand the thought process that brought the creators from the theme to what they made. Also, creative ideas tend to bring people of similar interests together far better than what they discuss over dinner. I ended up lucking into my group a few minutes before theme assignment just because I happened to overhear what they were planning on making. I’m hoping that game jams in the future will return to the familiar format because it simply makes game jams better.
Despite the lackluster format, I thought I found a perfect group for this game jam. They were all strangers (Webster students, to be precise), they seemed excited about the jam, and they too were interested in making a tabletop game. Unfortunately, a few setbacks during the weekend made this team less than desirable. Since this group was joined by a few like myself in the moments before theme assignment, this team became very big. To fix this problem, we decided to split the group in half and take two themes, but still work in the same space so we could all contribute to both games. This was fine in theory, but we accidentally (maybe) and poorly (definitely) distributed the team members. The excited game developers with whom I wanted to work ended up creating “an indie game where you plop down achievements and control everyone indirectly”* whereas I designed “a turn-based strategy game where you unite factories before the end of the world”* with two artists and two grade school kids (literally). In other words, I ended up working on the game by myself. I got some help from my team, but it was not very much. By Saturday afternoon, however, I realized that even the students that appeared excited were barely invested in the jam. I estimate that they worked on their game for 8 or fewer hours of the 48-hour event. From what I heard, other schoolwork distracted them from the jam and the jam itself was some kind of an assignment for them rather than a self-motivated project to enjoy. This was extremely obnoxious and it further soured me on the jam’s overall format. To play devil’s advocate, I probably became intense and controlling about what I soon considered to be “my project,” which may have pushed away my teammates. No matter how frustrated I got about my “one person team," I wasn’t about to let that stop me from enjoying the jam or the game I was making.
* These were are themes. Told you they were random.
With the help of early design discussions with my team (certainly their biggest contributions), I determined that the “factory uniting before the apocalypse” game would be a card game utilizing two 100-card decks. One deck was the “Factory” deck, which contained cards drawn by the players to earn victory points and use abilities to effect the playing field. The other deck was the “Calamity” deck from which the players draw a card every turn that generates an “end-of-the-world” style catastrophe to throw off the players’ plans. The player with the most Factory-generated points when the end of the world came (as determined by the Calamity cards) wins. I loved this idea. I thought that Factory cards would be a great way to empower the player and allow them to mess with their opponents while the Calamity cards would provide a fun “common enemy” and a dangerous randomness to make the game a challenge. I thought there could be different “types" of Factories which interacted with each other in specific ways and gave the game more strategic depth. There was only one problem: 200 cards to make and I was making them all myself. It took me until 2 P.M. on Sunday to create them all, which left little time for playtesting. Even with two days to work, I couldn’t waste time thinking of specific card interactions or combinations and instead just went with whatever rules came to mind. When the game was “finished,” I still loved the concept, but I was definitely burned from all the writing and suspicious of the quality of most of the cards.
The closing ceremony of this game jam was as fun as the other two I’d previously attended. The games were wacky and weird, fitting with the strange themes of the event. There were a few other tabletop games (including my teammates’) which were pretty neat. The most technically intriguing game demoed was called Titankiller. It was developed by a crew of frequent game jammers using an Oculus Rift dev kit. Watching that group’s creations is always a treat, and Titankiller contained a Shadow of the Colossus-esque battle that was awesome. My own presentation was rather lackluster since there was no good way to demo it, but it still got me excited to create an updated version for the upcoming jam retrospective. I left exhausted and a bit sour about the work situation, but I was nevertheless satisfied with another awesome game jam.
You can read this entry in my game-jam-related series and many other things besides at the N3rd Dimension.
