My first game jam

Like many other participants, this was my very first game jam. I've participated in hackathons, but I've worked exclusively with programmers. I powered through my impostor's syndrome and enjoyed every last bit of it.

I joined the jam with a friend (also a programmer) and we started brainstorming ideas and dropping them in a Discord channel. However, after the initial group brainstorming in the Game Jam's Discord server, we decided that it is best to follow the advice given and join a team of people we don't know. Luckily, there was a large group of 3D and 2D Artists and Animators looking for programmers. This is how the Tonttu's Travels team was born.

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I was amazed by how well we all worked together through the game jam. We quickly created a Trello board to keep track of the mechanics and assets we would need. This allowed us to focus on creating everything we needed without having too much communicational overhead. From there I took the initiative to spread the programming tasks across the four programmers in the team and to keep track of the progress.

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On multiple occasions, I had the opportunity to share my extensive professional knowledge with the team. Some members were not fully familiar with using Git or the Feature Branch Workflow (Git Feature Branch Workflow | Atlassian Git Tutorial, 2021), so I was able to help them resolve issues during setup, development workflow and conflicts. We often struggled with scope creep and while it is common for production projects (Elliott, 2007), it is especially devastating during a short term project such as the weekend-long game jam. Thankfully, I was able to identify it and strip down the over-engineered components to something that is manageable and useful for the game.

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Overall, we shared progress regularly and combined the individually created artefacts in the level often. Unfortunately, during the final push to get the game in a (relatively) polished state, the peer review process was put on hold and some last-minute issues surfaced which prevented us from having a build ready before the submission deadline. Thankfully, the game jam organisers account for such technical difficulties and extend the submission period.

Lessons learned

Coming up with original and interesting ideas can be difficult, however, the theme provided by the organisers made this much easier. Adopting this technique in my personal practice is going to be essential for my success as an Indie Game Developer.

Beyond the banter, there are many benefits to meeting so many great people during the game jam. The team included people with a various level of experience (first-year bachelor's to master's students) and I was able to learn a lot from them such as bringing assets of different types (3D models, 2D sprites, animations) into Unity and integrating them to create the desired experience. This, coupled with the additional practice of creating diverse game mechanics, highlighted the importance of game jams for the evolution of a developer into a games developer. I will be participating in game jams throughout the duration of my degree and beyond to aid me in becoming an Indie Game Developer.

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Version control is essential to any project development, regardless of the industry. However, there are some limitations to systems, such as Git, which are highlighted in game development due to the large number and size of binary assets. In the near future, I plan to research best practices around version control in the game development industry and how to mitigate the limitations of the standard systems.

Towards the end of the game jam, the team experienced more pressure to deliver and integrate all developed assets. This caused an unnecessary increase in stress and a drop in quality and testing efforts by the team. This can be alleviated by a couple of actions. Firstly, in order to prevent everyone from holding off on changes which leads to bottlenecks, the team has to be aware of the limitations of the version control system so they can work around them. Secondly, designating a project owner early on can ensure that the team maintains focus on the integration of all artefacts and help push the progress.

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The game

If you want to check out the final release of Tonttu's Travels head to our GGJ page or check out our playthrough below:

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References

Atlassian. 2021. Git Feature Branch Workflow | Atlassian Git Tutorial. [online] Available at: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/feature-branch-workflow [Accessed 1 February 2021].

Elliott, B., 2007, July. Anything is possible: Managing feature creep in an innovation rich environment. In 2007 IEEE International Engineering Management Conference (pp. 304-307). IEEE.

The Blender Foundation. 2021. Blender. [Software]

Unity Technologies. 2021. Unity. [Software]