Post Mortem, Free Lives 8 hour jam on June 13th
About a week ago there was an 8 hour jam held at Free Lives. I'd participated at the Berlin Minijam a couple months back, and had had a really great experience, so I wanted to see what it would be like to try it in Cape Town.
We organized a relatively small group for it, just 11 or so people participated, which turned out to be a great number. It kept down distractions, but had enough people to build a solid ideas pool, and, from my perspective as the organizer, the smaller turnout made it much more manageable.
We started at 11 or so, picked a theme at 12, brainstormed and lunched until 1 and then jammed for 8 hours. At the end, after everyone had a build working, everyone presented their games to the group, and got some feedback.
I think we all had a lot of fun. I certainly enjoyed myself, especially at the end, the games were just so good. I don't know if it was an impossible to repeat anomaly, that if we do this again I should lower my expectations, but the quality of games astounded me. I'd been impressed in Berlin, but our small group of friends were incandescent.
I think some of that came from the choice of theme. @Squidcor had suggested that picking a feeling to pursue might be a useful starting point, much like is talked about here: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ShaneMcCafferty/20150430/242288/Pick_a_Feeling_Chase_it.php ...and after drawing from a literal hat, and a bit of fine tuning, the themes we had were: "Indignation", "Doubt" and "Relief"
You've already seen "Clients from Hell" by @Elyaradine http://makegamessa.com/discussion/3242/clients-from-hell
And "Bowl of Indignation" by @Bevis http://makegamessa.com/discussion/3247/bowl-of-indignation-a-game-about-a-murderous-toilet
There was also "Snowcats" by @Nandrew , which I'm sure he'll post here in due course. It's a classic @Nandrew game, one that I can only spoil by explaining.
@Squidcor arrived a little late, but still managed to turn out a solid game called "Disk Cleanup". It's all about testing how well you know your own harddrive, and gambling the contents of it in the process. I'm hoping we see a suped up version of it at the next Super Friendship Arcade.
@BenJets , @Merrik and Jason Sutherland https://driftprism.bandcamp.com/ worked on "Pizza Quest". It veritably oozes charm. It's a hopeless/hopeful journey across a dystopian wasteland, in search of the one thing that will set everything right, set to beautiful, and beautifully synchronized music.
I worked on a game called "Bread Crumbs". I chose to pursue the "Doubt" theme, I thought that non-euclidean spaces in games tend to cause players to doubt their mental maps of the terrain, and non-euclidean spaces fascinate me technically. Deon ( https://soundcloud.com/deon-van-heerden ) produced some hauntingly mysterious music that sold the mood perfectly.
The jam version of "Bread Crumbs" succeeded enough to excite me. It also showed me that the levels needed to quite clearly suggest mental maps for players to be confounded by them. @Elyaradine helped me with some sweet-ass shaders today, and I got out a much improved version.
http://www.callofthevoid.com/Builds/Bread_Crumbs_Post_Jam_21_June_2015.zip <- technically now about a 16 hour jam with @Elyaradine's help.
http://www.callofthevoid.com/Builds/Bread_Crumbs_8Hour_Jam_version.zip <- Original 8 hour version.
Amazingly there wasn't a single dud game. Everyone had something to show by the end of the jam. And the games as a collection share a lot of similar concepts, and stand alongside each other surprisingly well. I'm hoping all these brilliant concepts are going seen to completion (especially "Clients from Hell" and "Bowl of Indignation", personally, because I fear both freelance work and sentient toilets).
What surprised me the most, was despite all the hard jamming done, and despite conversations carrying on until it was fairly late, I wasn't left feeling exhausted. I find full weekend jams to require some recovery time, which is a problem when I have a hard work week immediately afterwards. Jamming for 8 hours, and in relaxed conditions, amongst friends, left me feeling more energized than before I started.
Thanks everyone who came and jammed. You blew me away with your talent, and it was a pleasure to spend a day in your company.
We organized a relatively small group for it, just 11 or so people participated, which turned out to be a great number. It kept down distractions, but had enough people to build a solid ideas pool, and, from my perspective as the organizer, the smaller turnout made it much more manageable.
We started at 11 or so, picked a theme at 12, brainstormed and lunched until 1 and then jammed for 8 hours. At the end, after everyone had a build working, everyone presented their games to the group, and got some feedback.
I think we all had a lot of fun. I certainly enjoyed myself, especially at the end, the games were just so good. I don't know if it was an impossible to repeat anomaly, that if we do this again I should lower my expectations, but the quality of games astounded me. I'd been impressed in Berlin, but our small group of friends were incandescent.
I think some of that came from the choice of theme. @Squidcor had suggested that picking a feeling to pursue might be a useful starting point, much like is talked about here: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ShaneMcCafferty/20150430/242288/Pick_a_Feeling_Chase_it.php ...and after drawing from a literal hat, and a bit of fine tuning, the themes we had were: "Indignation", "Doubt" and "Relief"
You've already seen "Clients from Hell" by @Elyaradine http://makegamessa.com/discussion/3242/clients-from-hell
And "Bowl of Indignation" by @Bevis http://makegamessa.com/discussion/3247/bowl-of-indignation-a-game-about-a-murderous-toilet
There was also "Snowcats" by @Nandrew , which I'm sure he'll post here in due course. It's a classic @Nandrew game, one that I can only spoil by explaining.
@Squidcor arrived a little late, but still managed to turn out a solid game called "Disk Cleanup". It's all about testing how well you know your own harddrive, and gambling the contents of it in the process. I'm hoping we see a suped up version of it at the next Super Friendship Arcade.
@BenJets , @Merrik and Jason Sutherland https://driftprism.bandcamp.com/ worked on "Pizza Quest". It veritably oozes charm. It's a hopeless/hopeful journey across a dystopian wasteland, in search of the one thing that will set everything right, set to beautiful, and beautifully synchronized music.
I worked on a game called "Bread Crumbs". I chose to pursue the "Doubt" theme, I thought that non-euclidean spaces in games tend to cause players to doubt their mental maps of the terrain, and non-euclidean spaces fascinate me technically. Deon ( https://soundcloud.com/deon-van-heerden ) produced some hauntingly mysterious music that sold the mood perfectly.
The jam version of "Bread Crumbs" succeeded enough to excite me. It also showed me that the levels needed to quite clearly suggest mental maps for players to be confounded by them. @Elyaradine helped me with some sweet-ass shaders today, and I got out a much improved version.
http://www.callofthevoid.com/Builds/Bread_Crumbs_Post_Jam_21_June_2015.zip <- technically now about a 16 hour jam with @Elyaradine's help.
http://www.callofthevoid.com/Builds/Bread_Crumbs_8Hour_Jam_version.zip <- Original 8 hour version.
Amazingly there wasn't a single dud game. Everyone had something to show by the end of the jam. And the games as a collection share a lot of similar concepts, and stand alongside each other surprisingly well. I'm hoping all these brilliant concepts are going seen to completion (especially "Clients from Hell" and "Bowl of Indignation", personally, because I fear both freelance work and sentient toilets).
What surprised me the most, was despite all the hard jamming done, and despite conversations carrying on until it was fairly late, I wasn't left feeling exhausted. I find full weekend jams to require some recovery time, which is a problem when I have a hard work week immediately afterwards. Jamming for 8 hours, and in relaxed conditions, amongst friends, left me feeling more energized than before I started.
Thanks everyone who came and jammed. You blew me away with your talent, and it was a pleasure to spend a day in your company.
Comments
If you reach the magic door (from the second screenshot) you'll have seen @Elyaradine's work. Without him it'd be just a door.
I was wondering how you were going to tackle non-euclidean spaces within Unity and I was thinking up all sorts of hard portal-rendering type solutions, but you managed to make a really effective non-euclidean space just with some clever player teleportation - I love it. Really nicely done.
I didnt really get the breadcrumbs though - I picked them up from the pedestal and started throwing them down while walking down a side corridor, but when I wrapped around to the empty pedestal again, they weren't there. Then they appeared randomly around the "The End" section which was weird. Not what I was expecting them to do.
Thanks for playing!!
It's a lot easier to make it happen for one. From an organizer's perspective it's easier, but also from a jammer's perspective it's easier - it means only committing to one day of jamming, and possibly still socialize after the jam if that's a weekend requirement.
And although making a playable thing in 8 hours is in some ways more challenging than 48 hours, the tools have improved vastly since 2002, when the term "game jam" was coined.
I think 8 hours is also a magic number in another way, in that scoping for 8 hours seems a lot easier than scoping for 3 days. Maybe it's just a blindspot for me, but in 3 days I expect myself to produce full working game (if a very simple one) and there's a lot more room for fucking up when expectations are so lofty. But in 8 hours I'm happy if the thing just works and is interesting.
And having those lower expectations, and less room for disappointment (and the worst that can happen is that you waste 8 hours, not an entire weekend), I think 8 hour jams allows for a more positive experience, or perhaps just a more uniformly positive experience.
My experience in jams is that the longer they are, the more emotionally difficult they become (I'm basing this on my somewhat negative experiences in 7 day and 10 day jams), even though in longer jams the product is more realized.
So I'm trying to say that it would be rad if SA game developers held more mini-jams. I certainly intend to participate in more myself.
(I think there were other factors that made this particular jam excellent, but based on my experience of 2 separate 8 hour jams I think there's definitely something to the format)