Game Jams for newbies

#1

So, game jams. How do you do them? Are there any good starter guides? I’ve never been in one, let alone run one.

We started a discussion in Slack but someone brought up the point that this is a good topic to discuss more publicly so: here we are!

Kate’s already got some great answers in a thread over here.

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#2

Some short answers that I like so far:

  • Focus on community first!!! In TTRPG especially, we’re here to have fun and build each other up and come out with cool games, awards/winners get in the way of that
  • Itch.io has a lot of documentation resources for running a game jam, and is generally pretty good
  • Don’t worry about any existing norms, nor attempting to establish them - just keep game jams focused on a theme, and run them in a small time period (48 or 72 hours)
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#3

HEY so I finally got some free time to hammer things out here. I don’t have much of it, but lemme scribble down as fast as I humanly can. My thoughts are geared towards the “how do you participate” side, since I haven’t run jams myself.

So from the outset, I treat jams as a “run and gun” activity, and I’ve learned this behavior over the course of multiple jam-like activities.

  • Men of Stones, which I wrote for Game Chef 2011. I had a really high concept, I had a bunch of ideas about it, and then the deadline came knocking and I smashed together last-minute stuff and the whole thing is a kludged-up hot mess. The biggest thing I had going for me was that I was utterly ignorant of how little I actually knew about game design. I reached the end, realized I had a bunch of incoherent game, and sent it in because that was my commitment.
  • Keeton Journeys, a game written for 1KM1KT’s 24-hour RPG challenge back in 2013. I had a novel concept, a strong inspiration, heavy constraint (the game had to fit on a PocketMod), and a tight deadline. I sat down and cranked that puppy out. With a deadline like that, you have to keep your focus tightly on “does this advance the game?” and “how can I effectively push the energy of play?” I was incredibly happy with this one because I had a clear, explicit flow of play that I built around.
  • A Mystery at Midnight, a Fiasco playset I wrote for a contest. The time factor sorta played in, but mostly it was working around an explicit framework (the Fiasco model) that helped immensely, and I had a clear pot of media references that I could draw on for ideas. Lesson learned: have research material, and you will get so many ideas.

So there’s definitely things I’ve drawn from each of these projects, but the overarching thing is that you have to be unafraid to treat this like a sloppy first draft. If you have fun doing cool design for it, do that, but please don’t feel beholden to that, because it can often make you hesitate about spilling the contents of your creativity onto the blank void of the page.

In addition? Build up to it. I have literal folders of half-baked game ideas, ranging from a single paragraph to pages of extrapolated rules. Some of these are almost playable games, others are a tantalizing half of a game. I’ve added to this mountain a little at a time, just freeing myself to write whatever pleased my design brain. Do the same, and you slowly become more comfortable not just with putting your ideas to writing, but also with leaving ideas fallow on the page. Take those ideas that you’ll almost never make something full-length out of, and write them down. Allow yourself to get them out of your head. When the time comes to join a jam, you’ll be used to deploying an incomplete project.

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#4

I feel like for Game Jams, there’s 2 items you should point out:

  1. Make this a short timeframe, like 2-weeks to a month. This way you have a pressure to get things done, but that it’s also expected to have a sloppy first draft hack job. We all have done the “eternal polishing” of an idea and thus never seen it released.
  2. Make the theme brilliant, bold, and provoking. I’m more likely to be pulled into “200 words” or “sad mecha” than “fantasy games” or “old west”; it’s just the blank canvas problem of having too much space to really squeeze out the juices.
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#5

What’s the etiquette on submitting a project that you started before the game jam was announced? Like, if a theme comes along and you have something that fits it, but it’s something you’d actually been working on for a while?

I have trouble finishing things without deadlines, so I’ve been hoping for jams to come along that give me a deadline to finish first drafts of things. I’ve even thought about creating game jams for that purpose, but I don’t know if that’s considered bad form or not.

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#6

Most game jams want you to basically be using the jam to create the game, as far as I know, so that seems like it pushes against the intent of standard jams. However, a jam exclusively for finishing incomplete projects is a really fun idea and I think it works great if that’s upfront the premise.

Mostly, you want to avoid having a jam where people feel weird because they’re building from scratch and someone else started the jam with a second draft, for instance.

If in doubt, reach out to the organizers!

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