The TouchArcade Game Jam
Game Jams are fun. They are a creative, exciting, social experience. The goal of a Game Jam is to design a video game, either alone or in teams, as fast as humanly possible; usually in a single weekend. Some Jams are also great for making board games or card games!
Game Jams can be absolutely massive group events held in conference rooms and computer labs, or can be intimate affairs taking place in a friend's living room. Others are online-only events where people work on games at the same time in their own homes and share the results at a website.
The key ingredient in a Game Jam is time pressure. Whether spanning a 48-hour weekend, an entire week, or just a few hours, the essential attribute shared by all Jams is a limited time-frame. The deadline forces participants to speed-code. To cut corners. To think outside the box, and to whip something up as fast as they can.
Almost all Game Jams focus around a theme. This theme is often a closely guarded secret until the Jam begins, and participants are challenged to come up with a fitting game idea.
Occasionally, Jams have a competitive element: each entry is voted upon and a winner is declared.
Whether there is voting or not, Game Jams aren't really about winning or losing: they are community-run, highly social, feel-good events full of camaraderie from your game developer peers.
Whatever the format or rules, the goal of a Game Jam is to create your very own game as quickly as possible. Some rise to the challenge and finish amazing feats of programming. Many more fail brilliantly and never get to the finish line. Regardless of the outcome, everyone has fun. That's the whole point of a Game Jam.
This book has a mission statement: build an amazing game that you're proud of and will entertain players, all in one crazy 48-hour Game Jam weekend—and survive to tell the tale!
Embrace the best practices and techniques of past Game Jam winners and avoid common pitfalls along the way to the finish line. You too can survive a 48-hour game development marathon with your mind intact and an amazing game to show off to friends and family!
With this book you will learn the secret techniques that master Game Jammers use to create winning entries. We'll start by exploring great ways to brainstorm and design a game based on a given theme. We'll discover the best tools and techniques to finish a game in a weekend of coding, with anecdotes and advice from past winners and losers combined with humorous words of encouragement which are sure to help you on your way. Finally, this book will present a list of Game Jams around the world, online communities worth checking out, and fantastic engines, art resources and people worth discovering.
If you follow the system shared in this book, you will be able to build an amazing game in a single weekend—regardless of your programming or game design experience.
Chapter 1, Before the Jam: Prepare Yourself for Success!—We begin with a positive and enthusiastic look at the mindset required for achieving success. Learn about finding creative freedom in constraints, preparing base code and art tools, forming a team, and using social networking. Discover the behaviors that you will want to avoid. This book features an infographic from a questionnaire answered by over 700 Game Jammers. It includes interviews with Ian Schreiber (organizer of the Global Game Jam), Eric McQuiggan (founding member of The Dirty Rectangles), Jason P. Kaplan (founder of the Game Prototype Challenge), plus Mike "PoV" Kasprzak and Mike "Hamumu" Hommel (Ludum Dare administrators).
Chapter 2, Hours 1-12: Your Quest Begins!—How to hit the ground running, reduce stress, and deal with the theme. Learn from the mistakes of others through an analysis of postmortem ("What went right? What went wrong?") blog posts and articles, presented in infographic form. Features interviews with Chevy Ray Johnston (author of the FlashPunk game engine and winner of multiple Ludum Dares) and Dr. Mike Reddy (organizer of the Global Game Jam). You will learn how to come up with a great plan, the best ways to design your game, and techniques for brainstorming.
Chapter 3, Hours 13-24: Deeper into the Jungle!—Learn how to stay motivated by always moving forward through the use of placeholder art and design simplification. Features an interview with Austin Breed (founder of the Newgrounds Game Jams). Find essential mechanics so that you can finish a playable prototype early, with time left over for polishing and play-testing.
Chapter 4, Hours 25-36: Breaking Through The Wall!—The late stages of any project are always the most difficult. Discover techniques for working around bugs, dealing with stress, and keeping morale high. Includes a discussion of time management, code simplification, automation of art assets, iterative development, and when to break the rules of computer science. Includes an interview with Christopher "DarkAcreJack" Nilsson. From Occam's Razor to Brook's Law, we focus on common mistakes, ways to reduce production time, and dealing with imperfection.
Chapter 5, Hours 37-48: Getting to the Finish Line!—As the light at the end of the tunnel approaches, the really fun part begins. Learn techniques to finish on time and with your sanity intact. Deal with unforeseen hassles, tie up loose ends, trim the fat and polish polish polish. An exploration of the common features of winning games is also included. Featuring interviews with Pekka "pekuja" Kujansuu (Ludum Dare administrator) and Foaad Khosmood (director of the Global Game Jam). Learn what to do when you're in danger of missing the deadline, and how to package and submit your game. Focus on the importance of the name, description, and icon, as well as control schemes, difficulty balance and ways to "hook" the player.
Chapter 6, After the Jam: Fame and Fortune!—Congratulations! You did it. Now what? A discussion of all the ancillary activities you can perform after the Jam, such as playing and voting on games by your fellow developers, writing a post-mortem analysis, preparing the game for a public (commercial) release, attracting sponsorship or advertisers and getting your game on app stores and portals. Features interviews from Chris "fydo" Hopp and Phil Hassey (Ludum Dare administrators).
Appendix A, Game Jams—A large listing of Game Jams around the world, with descriptions and website addresses.
Appendix B, Game Engines—A list of game engines that are frequently used by successful Game Jammers that includes information regarding what platforms they support and where to get them.
Appendix C, Helpful Tools—A list of handy tools to make your Game Jam more fun. Includes screen recorders (for creating time-lapse videos of your work), IRC clients, tools that help you generate sound effects, and popular level editors that work with common game engines.
Appendix D, The Community—A list of online resources to help you connect with your Game Jamming peers. Includes social networking links, active Twitter hashtags, enthusiast websites and blogs, IRC chatrooms, and community discussion forums worth visiting.
This survival guide is split into several chapters, each of which represents a particular time period in and around a typical 48-hour Game Jam. The first chapter covers your preparation before the Jam begins, and each subsequent chapter dives deeper into the experience, twelve hours at a time. The final chapter explores the possibilities beyond that initial weekend session.
Think of this book as a chronological journey from preparation through to the completion of a Game Jam project.
More important than generic advice, the purpose of this book is to provide specific, explicit bits of advice that you can follow to help you get to the finish line. You don't just want abstract advice such as "know your tools", you want specifics, such as "square grids are easier to program than hexagon grids".
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold.
Scattered throughout the book you can expect to find tips and tricks in with concrete examples of the kind of decision making required to finish a game in a short timeframe. Here's an example:
The author of this book is a veteran Game Jammer, but to get a better picture of the do's and don'ts of Jamming, the community was interrogated over a span of several months. Blog posts, Twitter questions, mailing list e-mails, and Google+ comments were collected. Questionnaires were sent out to the most influential and successful Game Jammers, and their answers and contributions appear throughout this book.
Just for fun, respondents on the "gamecompo" mailing list and Ludum Dare website were asked to write haiku (three line poems) that relate to achieving Game Jam success. These appear throughout the book and are meant to keep you on track with a little Jamming philosophy. Light-hearted little thoughts like the following:
Finally, we would like to introduce you to two fictional characters who will accompany us on our journey; a wise and humble baby, and a cocky loud-mouth puppet.
Because we don't want to put down any real people or use them as example of what not to do, using two fictional characters seemed like a wise way to avoid hurting anyone's feelings.
The first character is Baby McFunkypants , Game Jammer extraordinaire, and believer in keeping things simple. His games are small, he always finishes on time, and he has a fun time Jamming every weekend. In this book, he will give examples of "pro style".
The second is a puppet named Lee Taxxor who often finds himself in trouble due to being overly optimistic. He thinks he is an "elite hacker". He bites off more than he can chew and has yet to successfully complete a Game Jam. In this book, he will give examples of a "noob mistake".
Together, these two characters will help us compare and contrast game design philosophies from two opposing perspectives. What not to do, followed by an alternative more likely to lead to success.
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The Protoplay Game Jam
The best thing about Game Jams is being together and meeting new people that are spending 48 hours in one location, passionately creating games.
I hope that in the future, Game Jams will blow our brains out with the most creative, experimental and crazy games ever made (oh, and that female participants > 40%).
To me, Jamming is all about it being a fun spirited event about people and games where passion meets creativity, sharing, and collaboration.
It is always fantastic to see the excitement build up, culminating in an explosion of Jam happiness and fantastic games.
Note
Zuraida Buter is one of the Global Game Jam Directors, initiated Indigo (a showcase for Dutch indie games), organized several Game Jams throughout the years and is passionate advocate for collaboration and indie game devs.
Website: http://www.zo-ii.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/zoewi