My first Game Jam
15 February 2019
My friends and I had always been interested in the gaming industry. We check the news of our favorite studios every day and then talk about it. We even dreamed about making our own games, but never really started or tried to do so. Until I received an invitation from a Meetup group I was in, about a new game jam. The duration was 24h and it was during the weekend. It fitted our job restrictions, it was perfect. I presented my idea to my friends, at first they were not motivated to try that because none of us had game development experience, it seemed impossible for us to make a game in 24h. But after some negotiations, everyone agreed to form a team for that event. We thought that even if we couldn't have a playable game at the end, we would at least know more about game development than at the beginning.
The day of the Game jam arrived. We were four, one had skills in music production, another in digital drawing, one other willing to do the game design part and I had software programming experience. We also took in our team two more people that wanted to try the experience for the first time too. So finally, we were 6.
In the paper, we had all roles to make a good game, but it ended up being more difficult to manage all the team than actually making the game. We had great ideas, but we didn't know where to start. Since everybody was waiting for something, I decided to take the reigns, or at least try. I prepared some small tasks like drawing the character, program the player's movement logic, compose several sounds/music. Everyone took the tasks corresponding to their skills. We started by following some tutorials according to our needs because we had to actually learn and make the game in 24h.
Time was flying and we still hadn't any prototype. Too many tasks were still left, and time was short. Two hours left before the end of the jam, and we were starting to feel the pressure of not having a playable game. Even if we knew at the beginning that it was the risk, we really wanted to have our first playable game at the end. We went to eat and were saying that it was impossible to finish what we wanted on time. We were even thinking to give up. Since it was impossible to finish all the tasks we had planned, I thought about cutting them, and adapt the game to what we already had. After explaining the idea to my colleagues, the hope of having a playable game came back! Everyone was motivated and stressed, we had less than one hour and a half.
Finally, we managed to have something playable, it wasn't as great as we imagined, but we achieved our first and primary goal. We were happy. The second edition of that game jam is in a few days, now we know that we must at first focus on the most basic version of our ideas, and then implement more elaborated stuff.