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brlka
@brlka

game jams

been thinking recently about game jams, and how prominently they feature in the hobbyist game landscape. there's stuff i like about them and stuff i don't. doing stuff alongside other people with a deadline is a good motivator, and it targets the common new game dev problem of not finishing projects. but i feel like it also often ends up replicating industry crunch, and i've seen people (myself included) get more stressed about it than is probably appropriate for what's supposed to be a fun event.

none of this is meant to imply game jams are bad and we should stop doing them, but i'd be interested in exploring some other formats for group game making, be it parallel or collaborative. maybe weekly coworking sessions, or exquisite corpse style chain games (gardens of vextro was ahead of the curve on this one).

i don't have any brilliant ideas here, but it seems like there's more to explore. does anyone else have any thoughts?

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in reply to @brlka's post:

highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

i think game jams have recognized how similar it is to crunch these days, so there’s slow jams and “just publish whatever you have”. but the latter has always irked me because your incomplete project will always stain your itchio profile.

but i do think that the collaboration aspect and “giving yourself an excuse to work on something” are nice things to have. i honestly think anthologies like Garden of Vextro, Where the Water Tastes like Wine, or Cragne Manor (a massive game where each room is written by someone different) would be interesting experiments and friendlier to newer people.

game jams remain too individualized for my taste. i think people also vote not caring about other stuff people have made since they’re always marketed like a competition: who can get #1 on story etc. if there was a way to eliminate the contest-like aspect and increase the collaboration stuff more, it would be cooler.

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brlka
@brlka

yeah, the voting stuff never interested me... it incentivizes making things with mass appeal, which loses a lot of the novel possibilities a game jam game allows for.

i feel you on the collaboration part seeming more fruitful. something i find tough is while you can divvy game work up somewhat naturally around elements like music, graphics, writing, etc., there's usually one person who ends up having to tie it all together, and that work resists being shared easily because it's finicky code stuff that's done quickest by one person. i could imagine a more sandboxed, genre-specific game engine helping to break it up more easily, tho...

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