In the meantime, my very first official gam jam has come and gone. I'm going to discount the Ouya jam, mainly because it was more of a promotion than anything else, (and I also later found that apparently it was totally okay to enter things you've been working on before). So, once the Iamagamer game jam arrived, I thought I'd give myself a clean slate.
Working in association with the newly formulated group Team Jupisday (named after the eighth day of the week), we hunkered down in our offices (and by offices I mean the living room of one of our members) and tried to put together a game in a little less than three days. I have to say, I couldn't have felt more cool or official doing this, jamming alongside other talented game makers. I was especially excited about setting up a livestream which broadcasted us jamming to the world. We had as many as 12 viewers at one time, and we got shout outs from other developers who were doing the same. Hip, or what?
The Idea Process
Once we got started, it took us about twenty-four hours before we could even come up with a concept to work with--the idea came to us just as night fell, when we were walking alone through the shrubbery to guide one of our members who had just arrived to the driveway. It was kind of frightening, but oddly titillating: we decided on creating a roguelike game where the player had to navigate her way along a path. The rest of the night we performed research to look at locations and themes. One of the members made a really great suggestion about basing the game in the Japanese suicide forest Aokigahara, so we watched an interesting documentary about it to give us some more inspiration and ideas. We also watched playthroughs of "The Path", helpfully suggested to us by someone watching our livestream. The research allowed us to give more depth to our game, and we started forming the designs, assets, and systems to be metaphors for redemption--we called it "Vaincre", after the French word for vanquish.
Our story was, the player was a young girl who found herself in a similar forest to Aokigahara, on the precipice between life and death--she changes her mind at the last minute, and the game becomes her effort to escape the forest and overcome the obstacles and mistakes of her past (represented by wild animals).
Building the Game
The team worked hard for three days straight making models of rocks, trees, birds, and wolves; we unwrapped them, textured them, re-wrapped them, boned them, and animated them. We built assets for the menu; buttons, sliders, text, lots of things. All we had to do was get a programmer to put it together in Unity for us and we were set!
We never got to finish the game. Unfortunately, our little group was devoid of a programmer, and despite our best efforts and frequent internet postings, we were unable to get one. So, due to circumstances beyond our control, the team tripped at the finish line. Needless to say, it was a pretty disheartening blow.
Postmortem(ette)
I learned plenty of new things during this experience. Among them was a variety of useful skills, like how to paint textures, how boning and animating a 3d model works; how to plan out a game with a team in a matter of days, how to take inspiration from things around you to design. I also learned helpful suggestions in preparation for the future--before you start anything, make sure you're prepared; collaborate with the group ahead of time to get some ideas ready, save up some money for decent food, make sure the venue is clean, and for god's sake, don't do anything until you have a programmer. Finally, I think that our game, Vaincre, deserves a second pass--I hope someday in the future with the right resources we could actually turn it into something playable.
In a word, the game jam was awful. In many words, it was nauseating, stressful, anxiety inducing, creatively draining, very unhealthy (I ate nothing but pizza and hot dogs and hardly ever got up off the couch), and made me want to murder all of my team mates individually and creatively in ways that would make even the most seasoned murder-mystery writers turn their heads. But I know that I'll inevitably want to dive headfirst into another one in the future, because it's one of the most fun and rewarding activities I can participate in as a future game designer. If anything, I'll do it again so I can actually finish what I started.
