in case u missed it: i just finished doing game jam with some pals!!! it's my first time participating in ludum dare, and i'm super impressed with what we were able to throw together (I HAD A BLAST!!!)
i wrote up a full postmortem on my patreon, but i wanted to talk a bit about it here too now that i'm not totally exhausted. this is gonna be like, less project-specific thoughts and more reflecting on the general gamedev/jam process!
wow u can really make a whole game in 72 hours if you plan it well!!!
i think the shortest turnaround for making a game on my own before now was with DATE TREAT (an april fools VN)--when i first made it, i think i spent just one day throwing it together. same for subsequent updates... other than that, i guess i've made dressup games in flash over the course of a day when i was a teen (do those really count?) but BOY is it satisfying to do a more full-feeling project with such limited scope and time!
the game jams i usually participate in are weeks to a month long, so i have a pretty good sense for how far you can actually get on a project in a matter of days. there's a lot of things you don't really think about (wtf you have to make the whole game?) that come up in projects, whether it's like... "oh no i can't polish my cool mechanic rn because i have to make MENUS" or "oh shit we need to put the game page together, do we have the assets for that?!"
for Greenfinger! i wrote up a little schedule of overarching goals for each day, which was like...
- day 1: brainstorm + solidify THE PLAN (decide what we're making and how many assets)
- day 2: get in all the rough assets to try to make a working build you can play from start to finish (so that we know the scope of what will be left to do the next day)
- day 3: clean up all our assets and polish the game as much as we can (plus release prep)
- submission day: last minute fixes and RESTING
having this formally written out kept everyone on the same page, and even though we didn't hit every goal (by day 2 you couldn't play through the whole story, but you could play through half of it and the amount of polish in those parts made up for it only being halfway done!), we still got to finish the game way ahead of the deadline cuz we stayed focused on our priorities!!
on a personal note, the day before the jam i made a huge pot of spaghetti, so every day of the jam i ate leftovers (skaghetti...) which meant i didn't have to put much thought into feeding myself, so i could work on our game without distractions. highly recommend keeping ur bod fueled up during time crunches like this! i think some of us stayed up a little late during the jam, but no one pulled any all-nighters, so i'd call it a pretty healthy success.
teams are super cool when you all know what you're doing and trust each other to make something good
to start on a bit of a bummer note (sorry!), i've worked with teams before where there was a lot of arguing over what exactly we were making, and a lot of like, egos colliding over design-type stuff... and like, i'm not free of sin lol, i've been on projects where i've thought someone was really underqualified for their position and was like, "making the game bad" because of it. which ISN'T FUN AT ALL!!!!!!! i don't like fighting!!!!!!!!! it's stressful to worry that your hard work is gonna go to waste over someone else's incompetence (whether real or perceived), and it's really easy for team projects to go wrong in this way, where everyone just blames each other for the end result not being what they wanted, instead of being able to enjoy/celebrate the nice thing they were able to make together... (we're making GAMES right? games are fun... let's just have fun.....!) and again i'm totally guilty of this too. working with a team is REALLY HARD!!! we all have a lot of feelings about the art we're making...
...which is why i'm amazed that this short team experience was completely drama free!!!!! (we even joked about it during the jam lol)
we all got to handle tasks we were comfortable doing. no one got something they hated shoved on them. every time someone posted progress, everyone was excited to see it and we didn't criticize each other... we were just all totally on the same page with what we were making, and just like, trusted that we could make it good without trying to control anyone else.
IT WAS GREAT!!! the best and healthiest team i've ever been a part of!!!!!!
which is why i wanted to gush about it a bit... because last year i thought i would just make games on my own and only work with someone if i absolutely had to (like for translations). so i can't stress enough how doing this project really like, healed my brain when it comes to team projects... it was a very short jam, but i've been revived (by the power of ska..! lol)
anyway!!!! i felt bad that i didn't write a proper post about our game yesterday (aside from the actual postmortem for my patrons), so i'm happy i could ramble on about it today. sorry this ended up being pretty long! thanks for reading!!
