The GameJam was one of those perfect storms, where everything comes together in a brutal and intense cyclone, yet you somehow managed to ride the winds to a beautiful view. By any measure we were successful, and here is the link to that success! as well as a link to the tool report. On to my detailed post portem!
PreJam
I knew organization was going to be key. 48 hours to code any complete project is a tall order, so I made a schedule of how I saw the day going, which was as follows.
Friday - Goal, lock down ideas. Finish scaffolding, start mechanic work.
- 1pm Theme reveal/Marathon start! Brain Storming session starts! Work stream starts!
- 7pm Brain Storing session ends! Feature lock. We should have a very solid idea of what we're doing and what we need to get there.
- 11pm-12pm End of Day! Work stream ends! SLEEP!!
Saturday - Complete core mechanics. Complete bulk of content.
- 5am-~7am deJesus breakFast frenZy. Sporadic availability. No work stream yet.
- 7am Work stream starts!
- 12pm-1230pm Forced sanity break
- 5pm-530pm Forced sanity break
- 11pm-12pm End of Day! Work stream ends! SLEEP!!
Sunday - Details, polish, the "juice", submission
- 5am-~7am deJesus breakFast frenZy. Sporadic availability. No work stream yet.
- 7am Work stream starts!
- 11am Code Freeze! No new work, only bug fixing and 'juice'
- 12pm Full lockdown. No more work. Begin submission process.
- 1pm Submission deadline.
A pretty reasonable schedule all things considered. With 2 kids everything is up in the air but its generous overall and gives some flex time.
Scheduling is important but so are tools. Pre Jam I didn't know how much help I was going to have exactly, so again flexibility was needed. Trello and Discord were the decisions there, discord for real time communications and trello to act as the 'whiteboard' and 'design bible'. We decided to use the 'MoSCoW' method to organize our thoughts, and focus our efforts.
Sharing tools for doing content was also important pre-jam work. I created a list to distribute to all contributors ahead of time.
Food was a concern for me as well. I knew I'd be putting in hours and I'm prone to over focusing. So healthier snacks were important to pick up ahead of time.
Overall, everything in the pre-jam phase was done properly. While the schedule wasn't strictly followed, it helped keep us rolling. The tools were helpful to have pre-linked, and the communication tools worked flawlessly. Discord for file sharing was frankly amazing and really allowed for rapid collaboration. The MoSCoW method was a good way to keep on target, as difficult as shifting things to 'Won't' became (more on that below).
Friday
Brainstorming
At 1pm the theme was revealed, 'Genre Mixing'. The opening set of contributors numbered 5 plus me, and it's been awhile since I've laughed so much. Brainstorming game ideas is fun. Everyone loves this part of process and we got ALOT of good ideas that were worth pursuing. In the end we settled on the concept ' Dungeon Health Inspectors ', which would quickly become 'The Kobolds of OSHA' after our 'minute of gameplay' session concluded. Deciding on which project to pursue was a tough choice. For something like this, it really could be a make or break moment, as if you don't have time to pivot if you invest too much in an unworkable idea. Making that call was just a preview of things to come.
The work was fast and furious... and while we finished the brain storming hours ahead of schedule, I squandered much of that time designing two movement systems, for a game where the primary focus was never about precision control. These were hours that would have been much better spent elsewhere.
My friends really came together to help on Friday, and as an art style formed, and a tone solidified it seemed things were really going to go our way. Saturday would come and dash us of those notions, but more can be read about that in the dev log at itch io, found here