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How I made a game with the Worst Title in the Margins of Life:

 

This whole post is a five min read, but here’s a summary!

• I maed a gaem

• It was alright! 

• Solidified my belief in planning and discipline

• Let myself down with poor self-promotion

 

Game dev isn’t my main gig. My ‘grown up’ job is <REDACTED>, which is a full time 9-5 situation.  More importantly, I have laid eggs and sired two wonderful larvae- who are both my pride and joy and the absolute bane of my life. Mostly the former.  

What I’m getting at here, is that I am not awash with hours of unfilled time.  

 

Naturally, this is the perfect situation to be in and embark on a game jam. 

 

The lassies, lads and otherwise at Gamedev.tv recently hosted a game jam, with a free course for all (valid) entries.  As a perennial bargain-hunter with intense FOMO, I entered. 

 

Solo, of course. 

 

This sounds dumb (because it is), But! Sometimes you need to challenge yourself- and if not now, then when? 

 

If you haven’t played the game, you can do so here: 

 

So the theme of the jam was “Life in two dimensions”, which honestly I wasn’t thrilled about! But ce’st la vie. 

I ended up spinning this theme into a high-level design idea of two distinct, but interrelated game modes.  This concept is one that has been done in many different formats- and isn’t new.  But I like it! 

 

I ended up settling on a platformer/racing hybrid because it ticked the two vital checkboxes of ‘sounds like fun’ and ‘sounds achievable’.

 

 

 

A word on priorities. 

 

My number one, overriding goal here was to produce something finished.  Fun as well, of course, but Finished. Funished, if you will.  This means no crashes, no placeholders, no obviously missing features or gaping voids where content obviously should be. This meant looking at the time I had (about 5-10 hours of active working time), looking at my feature list, and then immediately discarding 50-75% of the planned content. 

 

This intensive pruning of features before starting work on any code was hands down the best decision I made in this jam.  I’d go further, and say that the most valuable skill in this jam was my ability to manage my time, plan and enforce discipline against scope creep. 

 

If you start with a solid plan, your end result might still be a mess, but if your plan and end goal is poorly defined, you will always end with a mess, imo. 

 

WHAT WENT WELL:

 

As I said before, planning and scheduling my time!  But also- working smart as well as hard.  Even when not at my pomcuter, I was thinking about the features and tasks on my list, how to achieve them, what the code or art would look like, and so on.  This meant that the time at the keyboard was spent hammering out features, assets and bugtesting, and I’d moved al the “What do I need to do?” “how do I do that?” “how would that break, would it be fun?” stuff into my commute, doing the washing up, and all the other mundane menial IRL tasks. 

 

WHAT WENT LESS WELL: 

 

We’ll cover this more when we look at rankings, but there was two major shortcomings. 

 

Music! (there is none).  I’d pretty much ruled music out from the get-go.  It simply was not possible for me to put together a track and finish the game by myself in the time I had.  I can try and pretend that it made sense from a design perspective, or some other nonsense, but there’s no denying it was missed.  If I was in this position again, I’d either budget time for music (and work smart), or rope in a collaborator with that skillset. 

 

The other is self-promotion.  I hadn’t given any thought to this in downtime or planning which meant I was left with no cover art, or even a title, about 30 mins before I thought my time was about to run out. 

As a result, the cover art is horrendous, and the title is even worse.  This will become obvious at results time. 

 

 

 

 

RESULTS: 

 

So the most important result: I FINISHED- it is a FULL GAME that you CAN PLAY with your HANDS.  I PERSONALLY HAD SOME FUN PLAYING IT.  So big tick there. 

 

But also, as a Ranked game jam, we get some Hard Numbers we can look at.

 

Things worth bearing in mind here, is that this jam self-selected for people very early in their game development journey, I lost track of the submissions with “my first game/jam” as a subtitle.  No shade- many of these games were great! Lots were unfinished, or missing something, (also no shade- I applaud everyone who put in the effort to submit something! Everyone starts somewhere!) so even if I was in the top percentile of results, I shouldn’t then assume I was the divine manifestation of Video Game Development. 

 

Secondly, there was Nine Hundred and Ninety Seven submissions.  This is frankly insane, but also an accurate representation of the extremely crowded videogames market.   I was able to play and rate 16 games.  That’s a play rate of 1.6% of the submission pool. 

 

Even the most rated game listed in the jam received about 250 ratings, or (assuming only participants rated), 25% (the second and third most rated games sit at  ~150 ratings, or 15%).  

 

The take home here is that if the stars align and you promote the hell out of yourself, you can hope to get at absolute best, a quarter of your already captive audience to leave a rating.

 

This is where I fell down- I’d neglected a vital part of making a fun game for people to play, which was encouraging people to play it. 

 

Desert Day Worm Night  sits at 15 ratings*, and that was almost certainly boosted by itch’s helpful prompts that suggests low-rated or unrated games to try in the jam.  In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious why this is- 

 

The frequently rated titles all have titles that are snappy, and communicate something about the game or the way it’s played.  The cover art is universally appealing, If not informative. (Macaroni in a pot did this WAY better). 

 

If there was anything I would like to go back in time and change it’d be that horrendous dumb title and embarrassing cover splash.

 

 

THE ACTUAL RATINGS, THIS TIME

 

Final rankings are split by category. 

 

Criteria	Rank.	Score*.	Raw Score
Story	#88	3.400	3.400
Sound	#239	3.067	3.067
Mechanics	#250	3.267	3.267
Aesthetics	#271	3.467	3.467
Fun	#283	3.267	3.267
Theme	#298	3.333	3.333
Music	#696	1.467	1.467

 

 

 

Not  bad! Depending on how you manipulate the stats** we sit reasonably comfortably in the top third of all submissions, with the mechanics category sitting in the top quarter.  

Two big surprises for me here- 1), somehow managing to beat 300 other entries in the music category despite having literally no music. And 2) the story category. 

This absolutely blew my mind- was not expecting to be anywhere near the top 10% in *any category* let alone in story, something that’s deliberately lampshaded as lacking in the game itself. 

 

Two things the written comments mentioned were quirky writing ( thank uwu) and worldbuilding- which I apparently did by instinct (Why can’t you drive in the night? Buggy must be solar powered I guess, what does the character look like? Well if they’re fixing the buggy they’re probably wearing safety gear.. etc)