They say that to get better at something you should do that thing again and again. Painting, singing, tax evasion: the skill comes in the practice. This is one of the reasons I began this blog in the bygone age of two days ago. For indie game developers, the primary form this exercise takes is of the game jam. A game jam is a short event, usually encompassing a weekend or a week but sometimes longer, in which developers create a small, generally rough game. Sometimes these games are developed by a group and sometimes by an individual, sometimes the jams are held in a physical location and sometimes they’re online, and while most do not have prizes for the top rated games some do.
After all the games have been created and submitted, your game is then played and commented on (and in some jams given a rating) by other developers. It’s an excellent way of soliciting feedback, trying out new ideas and seeing how other developers approach their work by looking at games that are raw and new. The most popular game jam is Ludum Dare, which is held every three months or so and in the main competition gives individuals forty-eight hours to create a game based around a given theme.
To date I have taken part in five Ludum Dares. Sometimes coming fairly high in the rankings and sometimes fairly low, but always learning something new about myself and about game development. Oddly, as frightening as the idea of creating an entire game in two days sounded when I began, I became so used to it that when I first took part in a week-long game jam I had no idea how to use all that time. In the end I became too ambitious and the final product suffered immensely. The more times I do longer jams the better I’ve got at using the time wisely, however, and I’ve been considering not doing any more Ludum Dares.
Forty-eight hours is more than enough time to make a game; unfortunately it is not long enough to polish one. At least not for me. A game will usually be finished in a rough state long before it is released, and a huge proportion of development is about going through the game, testing every element, and tweaking the smallest parts until they’re perfect. Things like adjusting just how many coins drop per enemy, how much things cost at the store and exactly how these things are supposed to interrelate. There’s almost an infinite number of variables in most games to alter and calibrate, and while some find this part of development tedious I really enjoy it.
I’ve always been fascinated by how seemingly tiny changes can have massive effects. For example, whether an action triggers when a button is pushed down or when the button is released can fundamentally change the “feel” of a game. Increasingly I’ve come to realise that week long game jams give you the opportunity to try things like this, to prod and poke at your game until you’re really happy with it. The last game I made for Ludum Dare I was very disappointed with, but with a few more days it could have been fantastic. However the games I made for the most recent week-long jams I’ve done, the Public Domain Jam and Fuck This Jam, I’m really proud of.
For Public Domain Jam, where you had to create a game based on stories or characters that are in the public domain, I nearly lost two days when I discovered that I was basing my game on a story that wasn’t quite out of copyright, H.G. Wells’ The Red Room. Despite this, I soldiered on, reading through a bunch of short stories to try and find one which would be suitable and eventually stumbling upon Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Just like The Red Room it was almost entirely set in a stately bedroom, which allowed me to reuse a lot of what I had already created, and it was perfect for the theme of the jam, “Paper”. In the end the game I created was better than I think The Red Room would have been, and it came top in three categories and second overall at the end of voting.
Fuck This Jam, which asked you to create a game in a genre you disliked, was a lot smoother. I decided to make an economic sim farming game in the vein of something like FarmVille, but of course in an effort to make an actually good video game I found ways to make it interesting. I ended up with a game about a sinking farm, where your land would be constantly flooding and you needed to spend most of your money on draining it. Some crops would give you a lot of cash but cause your farm to flood faster, while some were more sustainable but with far less profit. For a game like this that is entirely based around making compromising decisions, having time to tweak and balance the quite complicated economy - how much seeds cost, how long they take to grow, how much the plant sells for, how long it will survive and how much it damages the land - is of utmost importance. So being able to devote a couple of days just to playing with numbers helped make the game playable and fun.
As much as Ludum Dare has helped me become a better developer, and I would recommend it to anybody wanting to learn about game design, I’ve come to realise that I don’t operate as well under those conditions as I once thought I did. I can make games which are good as Ludum Dare games go, but rarely do make anything that months later I still want to point at and show people. Longer game jams give you the chance to make mistakes, something which is key to the creative process. Moreover they give you the ability to proofread your games, to test them and make the little changes that are the difference between an interesting game and a good game. Annoyingly devoting a week to projects like this can be difficult, what with work and university and life and all those other distractions, but if you can scrape together enough time to devote to your preferred artistic exploit and show it to the world, personally I would consider that the most worthwhile way to spend seven days.
If you’re interesting in looking at my entires into the Public Domain Jam and Fuck This Jam then you can find them on my itch.io page.
