Category: Geek / Technical

I’ve been writing about my lessons learned from past game jams. In a few short years, I’ve gotten better at finishing more ambitious games, and yet I still had a lot to learn.

If you didn’t read them, see my history of game jams part 1 and part 2.

Mini LDs
Between the major Ludum Dare compos, there are monthly Mini LDs. Usually someone hosts it and has the option of specifying special rules.

Apparently I didn’t blog about the mini compos I participated in. My favorite is from MiniLD #6 in 2009, which had the theme Monochrome and the special rules that you could only use a limited palette of colors. The idea was to combine all entrees into a single game. The other special rule was that each entrant also got a theme. I got Guardian.

I’m not sure how the final result turned out for all the games, but my game was Guardian Fish. I didn’t even plan on participating that weekend, and yet I put together something that people have told me would make a great game for the growing iOS market if I fleshed it out.

In 2010, right before Ludum Dare #18, I hosted MiniLD #20 with the theme Greed and the optional theme of Fishing with a special rule: “Only one of each.” While programming usually makes it easy to make exact copies of objects, I was insisting that everyone had to ensure there was only one copy of any object.

While there was some griping about the constraint, there were more entrees in this MiniLD than any before it, even though a power outage and my project’s overly ambitious scope meant I didn’t get my own game, The Old Man and the Monkey Thief, done in time. I should have paid attention to my own compo’s constraints and adjusted the scope to fit it instead of trying to create a bunch of content to get around it.

I wrote up a post-mortem of MiniLD #20, including both my own project and running a MiniLD.

It turns out that people want closure and it isn’t enough to simply start a compo and disappear.

My favorite piece of feedback:

I must say there were times when I wanted to stuff that glass of juice down his throat.

You can’t buy memories like that. B-)

It’s also when I met McFunkyPants on the Ludum Dare site for the first time. He’s a pretty awesome game developer, game jam enthusiast, and author, and he runs One Game a Month, an awesome challenge now in its third year.

Full-time Indie Jams

The MiniLDs are great practice for the main compo. I missed Ludum Dare #19 due to the holidays, but I was sure to be part of Ludum Dare #20. At the time, I was struggling with how long Stop That Hero! was taking and I wanted a quick win.

The theme: “It’s Dangerous To Go Alone! Take this!”

Ugh. Really? The meme won? Fine.

I had the initial design I went with right away, prototyping it and eventually making it happen, except I didn’t get it done in 48 hours, so I once again took advantage of the third day of the Ludum Dare Jam to submit Hot Potato!, a game of delivering a package while avoiding the agents trying to grab it. You can pass the package to an adjacent courier (the “take this!” part of the theme).

Once again, simple graphics meant getting things done more quickly, although I didn’t get nearly as much done nor as quickly as I would have liked.

It would be over a year before I would participate in another game compo. Ludum Dare #24’s theme was Evolution, the Susan Lucci of Ludum Dare themes that never won until it did.

I managed to have something playable very quickly, and I iterated the development well. I didn’t get everything I wanted, but when the 48 hours were up, I had something fairly solid to submit instead of trying to rush something that resembles game play at the last minute.

It turns out that Ludum Dare had been getting quite popular, and it has been hard to get people to rate games. In the past, you were given a random list of 20 games, and you were expected to do your best to rate at least those games. Now, they introduced a coolness rating, which increases as you rate other games, and it’s value determines if other people see your game when they get their random list of games that need a rating.

I didn’t plan on setting aside time to play and rate games, which hurt me in this compo.

In my post-mortem of Ludum Dare #24, I wrote:

If I could do LD#24 over again, what would I do differently? I’d spend more time upfront trying to create a design better suited for the theme that is also simple enough for me to make. I’d make sure my list of tasks was prioritized so that at all times I was working on implementing something that served the core design. And I’d make sure that I had set aside time after the compo and Jam to rate other games. People worked hard on their entries, and with over a thousand of them submitted, it’s unfortunately easy to get buried. I think the coolness rating does a great job of making things fair, and the name is perfect. I want to be cooler next time.

Another Long Absense Before the Next Compo

But it would be another two years before I participated in another game jam. By this time, I had a day job again, progress on Stop That Hero! was indefinitely on hold, and I had spent some long and dark evenings figuring out what direction GBGames should go in.

And I apparently forgot my previous game jam lessons.

I came up with a lot of ideas for Ludum Dare #32’s theme, An Unconventional Weapon. Some of them were used by other participants to great effect.

I loved the idea I ran with, though: getting a giant monster to follow your character so you can lead it towards your enemies while avoiding death yourself.

My strategy was to doodle when I wasn’t coding, and rather than use my poor digital art skills, I would use my less-poor pencil drawing skills and digitize them.

And then I threw out that strategy for some reason and tried to create sprites that face four directions, taking up the lion’s share of the time I spent on this compo.

What’s worse is that while the animation helped, it looked worse in screen shots and didn’t look much better in motion. So all that time I could have spent on actually getting game play in was wasted.

It was hugely disappointing Ludum Dare compo for me. You could say I was rusty, but I handled my pacing badly and focused on assets instead of game play.

At the time, I was hard on myself and felt like it was proof that I still suck at game development. On the other hand, a few years ago, I would never have been able to quickly put together the limited game play that I did. I had a character that moved where you clicked in a very intuitive way, which is something people complimented me on, and I had a monster that you could attract either by getting in its vision or yelling out to it. The animations helped make it easier to see where the monster was looking, but I could have simplified them and had something working much faster.

So to be fair to myself, yeah, it sucked I didn’t submit a game, but I’ve come a long way from FuseGB and my first game jam.

Immersed Learning Experiences

My time working as a full-time game developer were definitely very good in terms of how much skill I developed and experience I earned in a couple short years, but the next best thing is a weekend dedicated to creating a game.

When you fully immerse yourself in the work, and when the constraints are that you need to have something finished in a short amount of time, you don’t get to procrastinate or be idle. You don’t read how to do things.

You spend your time doing.

And in the end, you have either a completed game that never existed before or experience to leverage for next time.

Getting that game finished is a great feeling. You get to point to a real game and say, “I made that. I’m a game developer. I developed a game.”

I’m looking forward to the next game jam. It’s another opportunity to grow with an entire community of game developers.

Last time, I talked about my first ever game jam and my first year’s worth of Ludum Dare events. After many years of thinking about it, it was nice to finally get some wins under my belt as well as a couple of good lessons. If you didn’t read it, see my history of game jams part 1.

My second Ludum Dare year

April 17th, 2009 was the start of Ludum Dare #14. The theme, Advancing Wall of Doom, was announced while I was out at a party for way too long, which meant I got a late start.

I remember thinking about something along the lines of Rampart, and eventually settled on a design in which you are trying to capture resources with your walls while preventing your opponent from stealing them. I had some neat design ideas and concepts, but almost no code after the first 24 hours. Oof.

Back then, Ludum Dare had medals for each category, and not only can your game be ranked, but the fun side competitions were the Community and Food compos. I got gold for my food pictures, and it was the only reason I submitted anything, because when the deadline hit, I had nothing else to show for the weekend but a button you could click.

Since I was writing everything from scratch, and my previous attempts had either keyboard input or paid attention only to mouse movement, I learned how hard simple GUI elements such as buttons were to implement. It turned out that they have a lot going on under the hood.

I really wish I had written a post-mortem for this failure, too. I think it would have been insightful today.

That year’s August, Caverns was the theme for Ludum Dare #15. I had a good idea right away, and I ran with it.

I took advantage of some new prototyping lessons I learned from Ian Schreiber’s free Game Design Concepts course, and I think I was able to put those lessons to good use. The final game had a lot of help getting finished because I spent some time figuring things out with paper and wooden pieces.

My Mineral Miner post-mortem shows that rapid prototyping works well, and writing good, non-buggy code would help too. Graphics and sound are great for polish, but a lot can be done with terrible placeholder art. I also need to work on my pacing so I’m not wasting time figuring out what to do at any given moment. With only 48 hours, every minute counts. Even though I took in a soccer game and still managed to get a game finished, I could probably have used those few hours to make things better. I would try to make sure my calendar was blocked for for Ludum Dare weekends from then on.

Full-time Indie Game Jam

I missed Ludum Dare #16 and #17, but Ludum Dare #18 was a special one in my heart. It was the first one I participated in as a full-time indie game developer. In 2010, I had quit my job earlier that summer to be an independent game developer, but I had no dream game I was trying to make. When August came, I knew I was participating in Ludum Dare.

The theme was Enemies as Weapons, and I normally don’t like to think about the potential themes before it is announced, this one was standing out in my mind. I wanted to make a reverse Super Mario Bros in which you were Bowser sending Goombas and Koopa Troopas after the AI-controlled hero. I had just been learning a lot about game artificial intelligence, and this kind of project would be perfect for putting it into practice, except I would then also have to learn platformer physics.

So I changed the concept to a reverse Legend of Zelda, in which you were sending out minions to stop the hero from storming your castle and destroying you.

I spent some time coming up with other concepts before settling back on the reverse Legend of Zelda. My prototypes look very much like the end result.

I created a project backlog because I knew this project was going to be ambitious. I was making an epic game.

As my Stop That Hero! post-mortem says, I missed the original 48-hour deadline, but luckily the 72-hour jam compo was introduced and so I used my Monday (because I was full-time indie and could use my days however I wanted) to finish the game.

I spent too long on the UI again, and I had to scale back on my ambitions, but I was very pleased with my casual strategy game. Unfortunately, the jam compo wasn’t very popular then, so not many people played or rated my game, but the October Challenge proposed by Mike Kasprzak was coming, and now I had a game I wanted to make. I made this game in 72 hours. What could I make in another month?

It turns out that it took me another year to make Stop That Hero! into a more fleshed out game. Oof.

More Game Jams

I was a full-time indie by this point. I had all the time in the world to participate in game jams, but I also had to do work that brought in money. What did I do next in terms of game jams?

I’ll write about it next time.

If you want to be a game developer, you need to develop games.

And when I look back on what games I’ve made, I realize that most were originated during game jams. What follows is a trip down memory lane with links to my game jams of the past, complete with links to post-mortems. Those are hard-earned lessons learned from a game jam veteran, kids.

2005: Game in a Day

Garage Games used to host the 24-hour game jam Game in a Day. I participated in my only Game in a Day on June 10th, 2005. The GID theme was Fusion, and I came up with an ambitious design.

I’ve been warned by TomB in #gameinaday on irc.maxgaming.net that I really should pick something simple for my first GID. The fact that I feel I need a design means that it is too complicated. Perhaps he’s right, but we’ll see how I do.

It would be an ambitious design for me today to complete in a 48-hour game jam such as Ludum Dare. I was young and naive, I was not very knowledgeable about the programming language or the 3rd-party libraries I was using. I had no experience with pacing in game jams. Even so, it seems even this early I learned a lesson that would serve me well to remember:

About 10 hours later, I finally have the main character moving about the screen according to the arrow keys. He only moves in four directions, but I’m not going to draw up more images for diagonal movement this late in the GID. I’d rather spend my time getting the fusion part of the game going.

Smart move, Self from 10 years ago!

What I recall most vividly during this jam was an overwhelming sense of fear the likes of which I have never known before. Early in my 24 hours, I started worrying that I didn’t know what I was doing and wouldn’t be able to finish, and I felt like I should quit. Logically, I knew it made no sense, that if I stopped, then it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it was a cold, numbing feeling I couldn’t easily ignore. Fear is the mind-killer, the little death that brings total annihilation, and I was apparently facing it head-on for the first time in my life.

But I did it! My first game jam ended with a playable game, the creatively-named FuseGB. It does not resemble my design at all, but I pushed forward and managed to make a playable game in 24 hours.

I gained a lot from my Game in a Day participation, including first-hand experience I never had before that would serve me well.

2008: Ludum Dare

Three years later, I was getting ready to participate in Ludum Dare for the first time, back before it had a dedicated domain name.

Even though I spent a lot of my precious development time trying to get basic infrastructure together, I had a finished game with six hours left to polish it up before the deadline. I purposefully picked a simple set of mechanics so I had the best chance of finishing. While today’s Ludum Dare competitions see thousands of entries, in 2008, there were 70. I earned my first LD trophies in this compo, including my prized “Amazing Pickle Sandwich” award from HybridMind and The “Thanks for Epilepsy” Award from keeyai.

You can read my Ludum Dare #11 post-mortem for Minamilist, which eventually became a slightly better game Walls and a short-lived Facebook game called Sea Friends. It even inspired Maximalist, a game by pansapiens I enjoyed.

Later that year in August, the 12th Ludum Dare compo started with the theme Tower with the optional theme of Owls. I had successfully submitted games to two game jams, so I went in quite confident. I was also dabbling in test-driven development at the time, and I thought that a timed competition was the perfect time to practice my TDD skills.

Ludum Dare #12 was the birth of the ridiculously obtuse Towlr games, but I managed to submit what amounted to a tech demo. It had an owl, and a lot of people were inspired by my user interface. I got “The Palm Of RSI Prevention” trophy from Hamumu for it.

But it wasn’t a complete game, and in fact it had bizarre bugs, such as the enemies climbing up the tower into the sky and getting stuck. As you can see, apparently I thought this bug was a good thing to show in the screenshot.

There was no way to lose, and no way to win. According to my Ludum Dare #12 post-mortem for Tower Defender, I wrestled with technology more than with game development, something I still struggle with because I insist on doing everything from scratch instead of using existing tech.

Months later, coinciding with the Winter Olympics, Ludum Dare #13’s theme was Roads, and early on I had a concept that I saw to completion.

These design notes eventually turned into these guys:

driving around in this game, Road LOCKDOWN!:

I find this odd, but somehow I never wrote a post-mortem for this game jam. The final entry post and development time lapse don’t really say much about what happened, but I recall getting the game finished and submitted at the very last minute, getting “The Photo Finish” trophy from Doches. The game earned me The “I Can’t Get You Because You’re In The Bike Lane” Excuse trophy from demonpants, poking fun at how you have limited controls available to steer only at intersections so your squad car and the criminal’s car can be driving towards each other but in different lanes of traffic.

But the important thing is that I finished a playable and complete game again. That’s 3-ish out of 4 game jams, and that ain’t bad!

More Game Jams to Come

Thanks for reminiscing with me. Rereading my old posts reminds me of how far I’ve come.

Soon I’ll write up what happened in the next year and beyond!