Game Jam Lessons I Didn’t Expect
If you’ve never heard of a game jam, it’s an event where participants program a video game from the ground up within a certain time restriction. Often the finished products are played and given feedback by other participants. At the time of writing, I have participated in the Ludum Dare game jam eight times: six times solo, and twice with a team.
Participating in game jams helps to sharpen obvious skills like time management, designing, planning, prioritization, and scoping, but I wanted to go through some of the odd things I’ve learned so far that I didn’t expect.
Constraints Are Great
Working under a countdown timer can be stressful, but I was surprised to learn how liberating it felt for me. Being forced find out where the ‘fun’ is and to boil down your idea to its naked core is not only a great game design exercise, but it also creates less work. There’s no need to juggle soul-sucking and exhausting goals and iterations that span days, weeks, or months: I don’t have that long!
As someone who struggles to stay on track for large projects, it feels quite nice to know that, one way or another, this will not drag out more than a few days. Plus, everyone is on an even playing field.
Audio Is A Multiplier
I have started trying to reserve four to six hours for audio at the end of a jam. Every time I fire up my game for the first time after audio is added, I am blown away at what an impact even simple sound effects can have on the experience. Games are audio-visual mediums, truly more than the some of their parts.
Composing original music for a game jam can be intimidating if it’s not your thing, but there are a ton of tools out there that make it easy to throw together simple game music even for those of us who are musically deficient. If I do skip on the music, I never omit sound by throwing in a few beeps and boops at least. There are a lot of easy-to-use great tools for creating simple sound effects out there as well.
People Actually Read
Not your game instructions or tutorial messages, obviously. But it turns out they do tend to read your story.
I got complaints in one of my earlier projects that the conclusion to my game’s “story” was unsatisfying. I always figured gameplay was king and no one was going to read whatever garbage I made up for the story, so I didn’t put much thought into the conclusion. To my surprise, people not only read it but apparently became quite invested. Weird!
I doesn’t have to be elaborate, but putting a little effort into a simple story with a decent arc can go a long way. In my next project, my story was even dumber, but it contained a clear arc with a beginning, middle, and end, plus a couple very simple cut scenes to anchor the writing. Whether it’s silly, serious, or contemplative, fleshing out even a simple story on the level of a toddler’s picture book can go a long way towards immersing your players.
Execution Over Creativity
A common pitfall aspiring game developers fall into is the ideas vortex. We all have dozens of great ideas (that no one else has thought of, of course) and it’s easy to get stuck trying to do something fancy or innovative.
Surprisingly, I have found that execution almost always trumps innovation. The vast majority of great games are great because they are polished and executed well even if they tread well-beaten design paths. If you think about it, the first game in a genre is almost never the best game in the genre.
Time and time again I’ve seen well-polished yet boilerplate platformers, point-and-clickers, and bullet hells fill the upper echelons of the rankings. I guess you could argue that just means players are boring and predictable, but then again there may be a reason your idea isn’t seen implemented in the wild. Of course, the risk could always pay off. Do what you want!
Design Over Theme
Most game jams have an overall ‘theme’ that is supposed to guide your game’s design. One shocking thing I learned, however, is not to bend over backwards too hard for the sake of the theme. This could be considered a special case of “Execution Over Creativity”.
One infamous Ludum Dare theme that comes to mind is “Two Incompatible Genres”. You can imagine the temptation to put together a hilariously broken game while running with this theme. The ones that were actually hilarious were great, but a lot of them ended up just being broken, or at best clunky. Mine included.
| Weak On Theme | Strong On Theme | |
| Not Fun | Terrible | Bad |
| Super Fun | Good | Best |
Nailing the theme is nice, but that is mutually exclusive with making a fun game. For me, having a fun game is top priority. Capturing both the fun and the theme is obviously best case scenario and can really rocket your game’s popularity, but if you have to pick one to focus on, pick fun.
Obviously completely ignoring the theme is an option, but judges usually get pretty upset by that and it’s just a lame thing to do.
You Will Think Your Game Is Bad
In my experience there is a pretty standard sequence that turns out more or less the same each jam: I decide what I want to do, and my enthusiasm starts out high. As I work on the nitty-gritty code, my confidence drops until somewhere in the middle of the jam I have a panic attack about how garbage my idea was and how bad my game is. Then, as more parts of the code start coming together and the game becomes more and more functional, my enthusiasm starts to rise again. Ah, so maybe this game isn’t absolute crap. By the end, my enthusiasm for the project may not be as high as it was when I started, but it has significantly improved.
It’s important to push through that middle stage. Knowing that it happens and knowing that it is common can help to mitigate the wave of existential dread that crashes into you. Get through it if you can, because we all want to see how your idea pans out.
Do What You Like
Most importantly, have fun and do what makes you feel good (including ignoring my opinions, if that’s the case). For me, sometimes that even means taking a pass on a jam you don’t feel up to, or calling it quits partway through if I really get stuck or made a wrong turn. I haven’t finished every jam I started. If you aren’t creatively immersed and being energized, it may not be worth it. Mental health and all of that.
Lastly, if you are new to game development or even new to programming/design in general, sometimes it’s best to just plug your nose and dive in to see what happens. With Ludum Dare in particular there is no prize for winning, and there is definitely nothing to lose. The earlier you get yourself out there, the better.