Global Game Jam 2012

Recently I took part in the 2012 Global Game Jam at the MATC Downtown Campus. The GGJ is the world's largest game jam event, with hundreds of "Jam Sites" around the world. Teams meet up for the 48 hour challenge of building a game based on a specific theme given by the GGJ Theme Committee. The 2012 theme was the following image, not exactly what I was expecting.

Theme for the 2012 Game Jam

This Game Jam was my first attempt at a timed game creation challenge, and my first time building a game along side a group of other people.  Needless to say the entire experience was a 48 hour crash course in Video game development. There were a lot of things to learn, the agile process being applied to game development being one of the most important. I should say that as one of only 2 first semester students in the Computer Simulation and Gaming program to attend this game jam, the experience tended to be more watch and learn from the veteran students than I expected.

One important thing to note is that I had planned on programming in C# since it is a language I am more familiar with, but the programming lead wanted all scripts to be in Javascript.  So in order to contribute to the project I basically had to quickly learn to convert C# to Javascript. Using Javascript was something I thought I would be able to avoid forever, but it wasn't too bad after all. Now, thanks to the GGJ event I feel like I have more skills to bring to the table both technically and in understanding the overall processes we used.

The team was a bit late to start due to some technical issues, so once we got the theme we hit the ground running.  After some brainstorming, the idea was formed on a circular platforming game. And so Temple of the Feathered Serpant was born.


Rather than reading a description of the game, you might like to give the game a quick play by using the download link on the game's page HERE. Assuming you haven't given it a try, let me just say ... there are a few bugs :S

I primarily look at the game jam as a learning experience, and among the most important lessons learned are the following:
1 Planning is essential (setting a realistic scope for a game, with a given limit on time taken into account) and
2 In a team environment, communication must be prioritized above all else. It is absolutely critical that the team focuses on communication.

It came down to the wire on this game project (to be expected) and under that stress there was some miscommunication that lead to a major problem with our scripts being overwritten, thus causing quite a headache for our lead programmer and build master to piece things back together as everyone else had no choice but to wait it out.  Once we got that problem solved it was the final hour, and it became obvious that we bit off more than we could chew by shooting for 6 levels in the game before getting one level done proper.

In the end though, I can say that by failing in a few regards, I learned more than I would have if it all had gone smooth.  All in all I am fired up to attempt more competitions of this type in the future, and will definitely join the Global Game Jam 2013.