So what is
a game jam? A game jam is a collaborative event to try create some form of a
game within the span of a weekend these games can range from simple platforms
choose your own adventures and often have to have a small scope in order to
achieve completion by the end of the event if they even completed all which the
main goal isn't to have a completed game it's more just to draw your best
effort to work in a team with people to create something my introduction to a
game jam started last summer where are part stuck in a game jam with my partner
and several friends just for fun while it was a mark for my partner's course at
the time while I was nervous about my level of coding and how much I could
contribute to it much of my friends group were experienced programmers and even
learns a new game engine they hadn't touched before on the weekend I mainly
focus on graphic design elements like designing the menu buttons and menu art
my partner designed 3D models to be used in the game as it was a 3D infinite
runner and the rest of the team used Unreal Engine blueprints to create the
code for the game. it was a lot of fun doing the project and I was worried I
wouldn't be able to keep up the speed, but it made me more confident for
attending another game jam.
this game
jam was organized by technical technological university Dublin and was themes
around creating an E learning project to help with learning different languages
our teams were paired with digital creatives game designers and business and
linguist students my team in particular had one member of my course and two
linguist students who specialize in Spanish. the engine we chose to create in
was called twine which is a simple engine for creating multiple narrative-based
stories so we created a choose your own adventure with the outcome will be
reflected whether or not you comprehend the level of Spanish learning from the
game.
we started
the first day by watching the presentations and workshops on the start of the
day and then we met our team our team was called team hyena and we made a
little logo for it and played a couple get to know each other games. all the
game jam was an optional extra for our course it was a mandatory event for the
business and linguist students and sadly out of our control the linguist
students still had part time work they had to attend to over the weekend, so we
tried to schedule around the time they would have available at the weekend and
give them a lighter workload that us creators would have learning twine and
coding. we decided we wanted to do something that was conversational in nature
that would be more useful in a day today situation rather than learning then
the man had a green eyes and a hat it would be more useful information like
times for trains basic directions navigating a supermarket I tried to ground it
in a realistic scenario of someone being lost.
we assigned
the linguist students to write up the story and they wrote multiple options
with certain ones being correct choices to choose that would narratively bring
you down the correct path and other incorrect options that would bring you down
either slightly different or bad ends depending on how severe the bad and was.
they had a majority of that done for Saturday which I use to create the base
bone structure of the game in twine I also wrote and added a few extra
conversations which I put back into a Google doc they had written the story
into to be translated to Spanish. I had also created a point system which would
reward the player based on how conversational they would be in Spanish and
choosing the correct options the first time and losing points for choosing the
incorrect Spanish options. once I had the bone structure of the game completed
I handed it off to my other classmate who he worked on the CSS styles of the
game as I finished his work creating backgrounds he had done a really nice
piece at the very start of the game of the train station once we had agreed
upon the palettes we were going to use for the day and the night scenes and I
continued on making a bunch more background images.
we consider
illustrating the characters as well that would be in the story but once we had
the backgrounds down we realized adding characters to it might be more
complicated and we also enjoyed the style of just seeing the locations in the
background with the text above so we decided to leave it out.
We
organized ourselves over discord and use the server I was in for studying as a
meeting place I created a voice channel on a text channel for us well the text
channel ended up being the most used. I also created a gantt chart in Miror for
us to loosely based our timeline on. We did it also have issues explaining to
the business and linguist students that would be hard to finish it all in one
day as they were hoping to not have to worry about it while at their jobs. in
fact we even saw the linguist students talking over discord while one was
walking up and down the floor of her job on call.
The lesson
I have learned from this game jam it's definitely a when to let go of the
project as towards the end there was not as much for me to do once I had
completed all the backgrounds then to wait for my fellow course member to
finish the game so I tried to help out here and there by taxing encode
adjustments but there was a certain point where I just felt too tired but we
managed to truck on and finish it before the deadline. what I enjoyed most
about it was definitely the writing aspects and being able to show the silly
little Easter eggs coded into the game in some of the bad ends to my friends, and
overall I think I should be less intimidated when it comes to learning new
coding systems and languages even though I'm fearful my dyspraxia will mess me
up.
