A Game Jam to remember

This weekend I took part in the GAMEHIGHED Game Jam hosted on itch.io with the theme YOLO.

It was quite the rollercoaster, but in the end, we did end up finishing SOMETHING.

At first, I hoped that my peers from the Game Dev Hub Game Design course I am taking a part in would join me on this adventure, but none of them had the time to set aside a full weekend.

So, at 17:00 on Friday I found myself on the jams Discord server looking for my 3 remaining tem members.

One of the sponsors of the jam were the Czech game developer Charles games, an offshoot of Charles University. They offered the jammers their plugin for Unity, the Charles FMV Engine, for free!

I was already determined to make an interactive fiction type of game. Those come in 3 basic types: text based (which can be also published offline as gamebooks), visual novel and an FMV (Full Motion Video) game. One of the advantages of developing these kinds of games is that they require minimal programming to work, thus being feasibly done by just a single game designer.

And the Charles FMV Engine works great for those, being relatively simple to use, yet powerful enough to make more complicated projects as well.

So, I was fully prepared to work alone, especially since I wanted to have executive power, as lack thereof resulted in me not having much to do on many of the previous game jams that I attended.

However, one advantage of an online game jam is that attendance was virtually unlimited and international.

So, I did manage to find 3 other team members, all Turks.

One was the programmer, second was a 2D artist with a portfolio that impressed me and one a musician and sound designer, who also had impressive work and experience under her belt.

They were all new to game jams, but I still felt very confident having people with such a wealth of experience.

There was some mismatch between our sleep times and schedules, so we ultimately didn´t meet until Saturday morning.

Not being in the same room meant that I wasn´t able to come over to their table and check their progress on things. This resulted in many delays and communication problems. Stuff like writing a message and waiting for a reply for what felt like hours.

Things weren´t helped by my usual fault of grand ambition. This lead me to write the games script for most of Saturday in hand in my notebook (that was mostly necessary, as I usually get too distracted when writing on computer for too long with too low stakes). When doing so, I imagined it would be a piece of cake to just write a design document on which basis the game could be programmed.

I did my best to give the rest of the team prepwork to do in the meantime, but I took too long to come up with a structure that can start to be made into a game.

I took the first videos (and, ultimately, the only ones that actually made it into the game) on Saturday evening.

Sunday morning I wrote up a schedule for the day, which was ultimately not followed by anyone, including me. One of the hardest things as a creative is deleting ideas that one already fell in love with.

One of the basic building blocks of the game was the idea of being mysteriously transported to another apartment in another country and surely and slowly going crazy.

It was agreed upon and ultimately didn´t pan out, mostly thanks to the communication issues, I feel.

Fortunately, I already had hard won wisdom from previous times jamming. I knew that having a playable build of the game running during a jam gives a significant boost to a teams morale and insures that even if the game that was planned ultimately doesn´t get made, something is still available to be submitted.

Nothing hurts more than making all the art assests and having everything ready and available for the game to be made, only for the programmers to fuck up and not delivering.

When it was 3 hours before the jams end and I finally have finished half of the size of the game design doc that I originally envisioned and there were still no videos from a different than my apartment coming, it became clear that the game has to be mostly scrapped.

So, I spent another half hour writing a new end to the game that I could shoot myself and that would give SOME kind of gameplay and satisfying ending to what we already had.

Only for the programmer to tell me that he has IRL work and has to end early.

Leaving me to learn Unity and the Charles FMV Enginein the remaining hour and a half, including eporting and uploading the project to itch.io

So, in the end, I managed to give a bit of polish to the earlier build made from the couple of videos that I shot the previous evening and set about exporting and uploading the game before the time limit ran out.

Just for me to get like 7 different problems and getting the build uploaded 35 minutes after the deadline.

Fortunately, the organizers were gracious (and they also know me already) and slid our game into the submissions even so late after the deadline, for which I will be eternally grateful.

So, if you read all the way down here, I believe you deserve a reward.

Behold, the folder with the games ASSETS.

Take a gander, poke around, leave some comments, just, please, do not steal.

I trust you fam.

Look at the Design Doc and marvel at the scale of my foolish ambition.

Look at the Design Doc WE ARE OUT OF TIME EDITION and see the fruits of desperation.

Look at BRAINSTORMING and see the optimism and go getter attitude of a jammer at the start of his mad dash.

I at the same time LOVE game jams and am ETERNALLY frustrated by them.

It is one of the ultimate creative experiences.

Not a good way to actually make art IMO, though.

Prototypes? Sure.

Complete things? Mostly hardly.

I am thinking about making interactive video collections with cool menus and more FMV games in the future. Hit me up if that sounds interesting to you!