Nordic Game Jam kicks off this weekend in Copenhagen. If you’ve never been to one of these game jams, it’s three days packed with fun jamming, interesting talks, people being social and great, creative projects.
So, for this weeks topic, we’d like to hear about your own experiences jamming. Do you like whipping the creative part of the brain, prioritizing coding over sleep to get something done before the deadline, fueling the process with vast amount of coffee and sugar? Or do you prefer spending more time chiseling out details and mechanics, compared to the raw result of a game jam?
Whether it’s your thing or not, how would you prepare for a game jam? Would you bring an idea or team from home, or would you prefer to think something up on the fly with a set of random people?
Would you bring any tools? And what do you feel are the best practices when game jamming?
Tune in to @unity3d on Twitter, where we will post updates from Nordic Game Jam over the weekend.
I agree that once you settle on an idea it’s important to stick to the vision. But the first idea (or three) are usually the obvious, uncreative ones. It’s worthwhile at the beginning to brainstorm 5 ideas or so, choose one as a fallback, and then come up with several more. These latter ideas will be much more creative and interesting.
Also: Paper prototype! It’s much faster to work out design issues on paper without having to fiddle with an editor, code, or art.
Also also: Backups or version control! No one wants the heartbreak of losing all your work in the 47th hour.
My last team groaned when I suggested version control, but they became converts when they saw how fast and easy it was to pull from multiple sources without having to pass around a thumb drive or manually copy from Dropbox as they’d done previously.
On another teamwork-related topic, it speeds things up in the long run to iron out some Unity-specific conventions at the beginning, such as deciding on a common namespace for scripts, passing around a token to the person who’s working on a scene (since it’s easiest in jams for one person at a time to edit a scene), and using prefabs for everything so other people can edit prefabs without having to edit scene instances. This helps prevent the bottleneck of artists twiddling their thumbs waiting to get into a scene.
We made a very early version of Stikbold! at NGJ13 - that snowballed into a full fledged Steam and console release in April 2016. I wouldn’t recommend going to game jams to get a step into the industry but it certainly can be done.
Very much everyone! There’s usually also people of every experience level and every corner of the industry - from AAA to indies, to artists and film people. It’s great fun!
never done a game jam before… done plenty of overnighters at lan parties playing games in the past though… this whole making games in a few days sounds stressful what’s wrong with you all jk
GitHub - chall3ng3r/GameOn: Play Unity3D games from browser with a click! Unity should have and do something like that more officially, much better having a game windowed at a resolution you can move around that gets its own taskbar button etc instead of the game in your web browser on a tab surrounding by browser ui.
Been to a couple of global game jams, so I’ve picked up some things:
It’s a lot faster to make a board game than it is to make a video game. If you really want to flex design muscles, consider doing that instead!
Brainstorming over food is a good idea. Just after the theme of the jam has been announced, grab your group and go discuss what you want to make over pizza.
Game jams are a great way to learn a new engine or tool, or to try a new kind of game. Haven’t worked with 2D before? Try that! Or 3D! If you’re making platformers as your day job, make an RTS or an FPS or vice versa!
An alternative that many overlook is to experiment with art style. I see a lot of weird and cool gameplay ideas, but seldom cool and unique art ideas. Two years ago, somebody on our jam made a very simple game where you ran around on a planet where you’d crashed your space ship to pick up parts. The group had made that planet with a really neat tilt-shifted-like camera and a ton of cool art assets and custom screen effects and shaders. They probably spent thirty minutes on the gameplay, and made one of the most interesting games on the jam!
Unless it’s absolutely necessary, not every member on the team needs to have a copy of the game on their machine. Setting up a workflow takes time and effort that’s better spent on making stuff. Your sound and art people can make assets on their own computer, send it to the designer, and if necessary adjust it in-engine on the designers/programmers computers. Teaching a 3D artist fresh out of college to use git will eat precious time.
Of course, you could use Collaborate, but last time I tried that on a jam it randomly deleted work on a couple of groups, so I would recommend against that for now
If you’re participating in the global game jam or some other large jam where you send in the end result, their website will be down when you’re going to deliver the game. Don’t stress about it. Delivering the game isn’t actually important. Rather spend time making a thing that your group likes, and consider their website working as an unlikely bonus.
