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Stepping Back: Checkpoints at the Global Game Jam

1/25/2017

4 Comments

 
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 was lucky enough to have the opportunity to participate in my second Global Game Jam this past weekend, and I came away from the experience exhausted but very proud to have had a part in creating A Matter of Fact. (we even won an award!) Although pride and exhaustion are the two biggest takeaways that come to mind right now, the team (and certainly I as an individual) learned a lot about fast prototyping and the constrained type of development process implicit to a game jam. This post is going to act as something of a postmortem to our design and development process, in order to highlight some of the high-level lessons that we learned -- oftentimes the hard way -- over the course of the weekend.

Lesson 1: Scope not only your ambitions, but your genre too

A Matter of Fact was originally conceived as a response to the Jam theme of "waves;" with the inauguration and its implications for the flow of information and news in the US fresh in our minds, we came up with the idea of a strategy game where two players have to position transmission arrays to win the hearts and minds of the people. However, we also wanted to incorporate the idea of propaganda and fake news into this concept; players should shoot for maximum dispersal of their message, rather than (perish the thought!) truth or objectivity. While I'm still intensely proud of the fact that we were able to unite these two disparate gameplay mechanics in a way that feels mostly cohesive, even just the act of describing them in writing makes apparent to me how susceptible the act of uniting the two concepts is to overblown scope and feature creep. Knowing that we were hoping to make a large-scale strategy game should have been a key tip-off for us that our game would need to be as mechanically simple as possible so as to afford us enough time to conduct the requisite balancing and playtesting time. Though playtesting is key to the success of any game, our choice of genre means that we would ideally need more effort on this front than, say, a platformer or a shooter. We really weren't able to put the time towards this though, as much of our design and development time was dedicated to creating and uniting these two concepts. As a result, the game isn't as balanced as I would like it to be; a hard-won design and production lesson to take with me to future jams.

Lesson 2: Take breaks when brainstorming, but decide fast

Thankfully, this lesson comes from one of our successes at the jam. After about half an hour of brainstorming, we broke to go get dinner. On reconvening, we were immediately able to not only come up with the idea that would become A Matter of Fact, but also decide on its overarching design principles and purpose. When all's said and done, our ideation phase lasted only about an hour, leaving us the remaining forty-seven to actually create the game. I personally attribute a great deal of the success here to resisting the urge to immediately sit in a circle discussing ideas for hours after receiving the theme. By conducting a more informal and active brainstorming session (team members would tag in and out to write ideas on the whiteboard or go get food), we were able to find our idea quickly and devote more time to development. This is in direct contrast to my brainstorming experience at my first game jam, where my team and I spent five hours sitting around a table in a boring white room discussing what our game wouldn't be. The distinction between these two methods and their impact on their respective games is obvious, and definitely informs the brainstorming approach I intend to take in future.

Lesson 3: Once you've started, take the time to stop

An issue we had once we were fully locked into our development process was one of inertia. As we got closer and closer to the weekend's deadline, we found it harder and harder to stop and reconvene to make sure we were actually doing the right thing. As a result, we ran into some miscommunication and scoping issues at the very end of the Jam, resulting in some far far too eleventh-hour feature implementations that could have been avoided with some scheduling effort. Because this endgame cram is predictable, we might have preemptively scheduled checkpoint meetings to discuss delegation, the direction of the game, and what we need to do next. 

Lesson 4: Be careful with random generation
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​Yep.
4 Comments
Omar Cheikh-Ali
1/25/2017 08:36:34 pm

SCOPE is of the utmost importance - I began to realize that while I was proctoring the CMU GGJ site. In previous years, many new students in the prototyping class overscoped their ideas for the game jam, leading to a lot of half-finished products by the end of the weekend. I kind of feel like because a lot of students this year had Unity experience but didn't mark "super confident" on the skills survey, they naturally scoped their games down.

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Rachel Moeller
1/31/2017 04:20:35 pm

As a member of this team, I really agree with the scoping issue of the two rather disparate modes of interaction that ended up bifurcating the game into phases. The initial idea was just one long continuous thought that made sense as a sentence, but in reality were two different games. I think you also hit home with lesson 3: it was incredibly hard to stop, build, and playtest what we had rather than sneak one last feature in and playtest after that. Resisting that compulsion is vital. In the end it doesn’t matter that playtesting an unfinished thing feels vulnerable. We needed that playtesting feedback to make the interactable a game experience and we didn’t get enough of it.

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Breeanna Ebert
2/1/2017 09:26:38 pm

All of these points are so important, not just in a global game jam, but for making any type of game. I mostly compose soundtracks for games, but these lessons are still applicable. Music helps drive the genre and feel of the game. You have to decide what era, what key, what form would be best to use. Then you just have to compose the first thing that comes to your mind without thinking about mistakes. You put it into the game and see if it could work. If not, you try again. If it does, you polish it. As for the last point, I don't think composers have gotten to the point where we can make good music using random values.

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Simon
2/2/2017 01:11:32 am

A good set of lessons to conclude the rather successful game jam. A lot of the difficulty in creating a game is rapidly coming up with ideas. People often believe that ideas come when they do and there's few ways to control it, and locked in a room with a deliverable within 48 hours and nowhere to start would set most people in panic. The lessons you took away will help aid people in coming up with better ideas faster. Regarding random generation: plan. It may sound counterintuitive, but once you mastered the art of probability, you can often avoid overly surprising results. Well executed randomness can add wonders to a game.

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