reinebold.com

The hallways of the Savannah College of Art and Design building are filled with paintings, sketches, photographs of people in weird poses, and students scuttling to class with coffee mugs in hand.  Tucked into this fortress of creativity, on the third floor, are several clusters of computers which last weekend were designated for Global Game Jam 2010.

I was there to make a game in 48 hours.  I had made games before, but never within such a constrained time limit.  I paid the fifteen dollar entry fee and joined up with other hopeful indie-developers for a frenetically paced weekend of game design.

It began with an intro video describing the challenges we would face.  The keynote speaker, a British developer, talked about the difficulties of explaining his career to others.  His friends thought games were a waste of creative energy.  99% of the time, he told us, they are right.  But here was our chance to make something belonging to lucky 1%.  We split into groups and were told to start.

My group and I moved to an empty computer lab to begin brainstorming.  The secret themes of the competition were “deception” and “rain, plain, or Spain.”  We found a whiteboard and took turns shouting out ideas.  Eventually we settled on “Don Quixote,” in that he deceived himself into fighting windmills that weren’t there.  Next we had to decide what language to program in:

“C#,” someone suggested.

“Who all knows that?”  A few hands went up.

“Flash?”  One and a half hands went up.

“Java?”  Four hands went up.

After some deliberation, we settled on Flash – thinking it would allow us to port our game to any operating system.  Sure, not many of us knew Flash – but we figured we could learn.  Someone went to the gas station to buy energy drinks and our marathon coding/learning/designing session began.

We ate pizza and drank carbonated beverages – making lists on the whiteboard of what features we wanted in our game.  We had a lot of big ideas – rain, fog, atmosphere, music, a funny sidekick named Sancho, pixel perfect collision detection.  We tried to make those into a reality.  But as the clock progressed, our game didn’t.

Soon it was Sunday and there were only four hours left until the deadline.  We crossed items off the checklist and dropped features; all the while hoping that when we finished we would have something worthwhile.  The time limit expired and we turned in what we had:  a .swf file with some cool visual effects, but one without a real game.  My team and I failed to complete our project.

It is tempting, and perhaps accurate, to label the entire weekend as a waste of time.  Had I, like Don Quixote, deluded myself into thinking that making a game in 48 hours was possible?  Yet three of the teams at our location managed to create complete games that were both fun and innovative.   Why did we fail where they succeeded?

A couple of reasons.  First, not many enough people in the group were comfortable with Flash.  All of the programmers, myself included, eventually learned it, which is a noteworthy accomplishment for a weekend.  However, the goal of the weekend was not to learn Flash:  it was to build a game.  We should have picked a language that all members of the team not only knew, but excelled at.  Secondly, we didn’t create playable prototypes early enough.  In hindsight, we should have had something playable ready the first night.  Granted, we did have prototypes – but they were just of subsystems of the game, not the game itself.  We waited too long to integrate all the parts.  Finally, our group lacked a true project manager to keep us on track.  We should have had someone to tell us to switch languages as soon as it was obvious our current path was leading us straight into a muddy mess.

I enjoyed Global Game Jam and will compete in it again next year.  I got to see other people’s programming styles and was exposed to Microsoft’s XNA framework and the Unity engine, both of which I will use in the future.  As frustrating as the weekend was, it reaffirmed my desire to make games.

Tags: embedded reporting, game design, global game jam 2010, insider account