So your first game jam… It’s not supposed to go well, right? I’m sure plenty of people have had a similar experience. You’re starting to get more serious about making games. You start to have visions of becoming a full time game developer. You’re binging the greats like GMTK, Brackeys and heart beast. You start a youtube channel, you make a business name, maybe even release a short game.

And then you hear about game jams. The ultimate test of game design. A way to put your creativity on display and prove, once and for all, you do belong. You are worthy of the title Game Developer.

You sit on stream waiting for the them announcement. You spend time thinking of mechanics, setting and story for your game. You slave for hours, writing code, making your game perfect. You make art that truly make your game look unique. You make levels, add music, make a UI and even Icons. You bundle it all up in a pretty package hopefully before the deadline. Get it up on itch.io and then wait.

And then you Realise.

You. Did. None. Of. Those.

And of course, it didn’t go well. It’s like competing in a car race for the first time, sure you know how to drive, but you don’t know how to go around in a circle really really really fast. So I’ve made games, I can code, done art and all that. But never in a 2 day period or a week. And it’s really hard. It’s really what makes Game Jams so great for learning about what makes a game good. It really cuts out all the fat, gets rid of all the noise.

So I did my first game jam about a month ago. The GoGodotJam was annouced and I initially didn’t think about it much but I had wanted to start doing game jams and this was a week long jam. I’m fairly time poor and week is a much more realistic time frame. I created my first Android game in two months. So I should be able to do a simple game in ten days.

I was sitting on the bus waiting for theme to be annouced, which was 8am on monday for me. The theme was growth. Which was perfect for me, considered all the assets I had created at this time where forest themed. I have plans to create a puzzle platformer revolving our little fox friend here. So I thought it would be a great time to test it out. I starting picturing relaxing scenes of my fox having to find water or dew in order to make a plant grow to progress up a tree, so he could climb to the top. Which I think a lot of people did, but I abandoned that Idea for something a little more interesting. I pulled a switcharoo.

What if. And hear me out. The growth is the thing you’re trying to stop? That would be cool.

So the final idea. You play as a fox who has summoned by a “tree of life” in order stop a corruption from over coming a forest

Damn, I thought. That sounds awesome.

So I had my art already. I had a player controller set up that first night. I just needed to make obstacles for him to avoid. And a corruption to defeat.

And that’s where trouble started brewing. Did I mention I’m time poor? And I have to make art, which I’m super slow at doing. I spent the Next Three Days designing the corruption. Which was a horrible mistake and I ended up throwing it all out in favour of just reskinning my forest floor tile map to be purple. Something simple, which I should have done to begin with.

I made these tentacle like things that you would have to search out, find and kill in order to progess to the next level.

And I placed the corruption around the map. Which was essentially just this games version of spikes.

I set up a win and lose state and I was good.

And then. I had the best worst Idea ever. What if the corruption grew as time went on? And the longer things went on the harder it became to progress. Brilliant Right?

No. Absolutely not.

Even though I thought I had this game changing breakthough. I had just made the number one cardinal sin in game jams.

I made my game unforgiving and un necessarily hard.

I was going for frantic and chaotic. And I got shit. Total utter shit.

I watched one other jamer play my game on stream and oh boy, was it cringe worthy. Felipe Rattu on twitch played through my game. I watched him fail over and over again. It was baaaad.

I also need to work on my control scheme, since the feeback was. It’s horrible. And not everyone has a controller.

Anyway. You might have already guessed that, based off my tone, that I didn’t rank well. And you’d be right. 92 out of 178. So Bottom 50%. Which I guess isn’t the worst.

But I’m a competitive guy and I like to win. And this is ranked, so I would like to one day find my way to the top.

So I set a few rules after this jam that I think I need to adhere to:

Rule number one:

No Art. I’m slow at art and not that great either. I need to have some prepared in advance or get CC Zero art online. You don’t have a lot of time. Other games use squares and colour to make a game and they do better than you. Art can help you stand out, but it’s not going to for me, since I suck. It just slows me down.

Rule Two:

Only One new mechanic. Other than that, stick to what you know. Want to make a First person shooter? Well guess what, No. You can’t do that in a jam since you’ve never done that before. If I had made FPSs before then it would be an option and I could add something unique. If you’re venturing into new territory which means you’re spending time reinventing the wheel, just to run yourself over.

Rule Three:

Keep it fun. Hard games are the ultimate achillies heel in game jams. You’re just setting yourself up to fail. Don’t punish players too harshly. I’d argue for no game over, level reset. And swap that out for a position reset.

So hopefully in the future I will be able to produce something that’s a little more fun. But for now, it’s back to working on my regular projects for a bit.

I just put out a course on skillshare, that goes over the more technical aspects of a platformer jump. It’s based off of the GDC talk building a better jump by kyle pittman. Which is a great resource for game developers on bringing in real world physics to your jump. In my course I show you how it can be done in the Godot Game engine. We also touch on Coyote time and Jump buffering, which combine together to create a great user experience.  The course is short, it can be watched in 30 minutes, so you it won’t take all day and you’ll be able to get some really technical aspects down in the Godot Game engine.

Then it’s on to working on my larger game projects, which hopefully I will be able to talk about more real soon.