GameJam 2013 ”Everybody is a noob”

An activity becoming more and more common in the game developer industry are so called Game Jams. For those who don’t know what such are, the concept of Game Jams is to, over a varying (but generally rather short) time, create a game and compete with others over which is best in certain categories. This can be done either in teams or individually. During this years alumni days, we had such an event. The theme of it was ”Everybody is a noob”, essentially meaning that everyone had to use a relatively easy and primitive program called Game Maker. Usually Game Jams go on for about 24 hours, sometimes 48. We had 8 hours. In fact, we didn’t even have that much time, since there was a very interesting lecture scheduled in the middle of the Game Jam (not mandatory, but something many of us wanted to go to), leaving us with approximately 6 hours! This created some very interesting group dynamics, and it was a very good lesson to see what elements to prioritise in following projects. In our team of 5, 3 were artists and 2 programmers, and as it turned out we ended up with a lot of graphics that we’re never even used, because the programming took such a long time to implement. This was probably caused by the decision to program using scripting instead of already existing events and actions. Usually, assuming you want a very particular behaviour, this is a better choice since it gives you complete control over that behaviour. The downside to such an approach is that you are solely responsible if that code were to fail. This is what happened to us. The lesson to be learnt from this is, in my opinion, to ”cheat” as much as possible and use already existing stuff. At least if you’re under a lot of pressure time wise and the only thing that really matters is the end product, as is very true for a Game Jam!

Another very valuable effect of a Game Jam is that you learn a lot about yourself. You are able to learn and realise things such as how you work best, which types of people you are compatible with (and not compatible with for that matter) as well as what/which roles you are comfortable with having. All this BEFORE going into a huge project! Luckily for us, except for the hiccup on the programming side, we didn’t have any major incompatibility issues and we found our roles pretty quickly. That is unless the others had issues with me that they didn’t mention… I of course hope this isn’t the case, but if it is I really hope they do tell me so that I can improve myself!