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Tips for my first game jam? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey, everyone! So, I'm new here and I've been checking out all the super helpful posts in this group. After reading about it being beginner-friendly (totally makes sense with that name, right?), I decided to join the My First Game Jam!

It just kicked off tonight, and I'm going solo on this one. The theme is "cycles," and I'm drawing blanks on good ideas, but I'll sleep on it and hope something clicks.

Basically, I'm crossing my fingers that someone here has some tips for a newbie like me diving into her first jam! I kinda got carried away chatting in the jam Discord till late, so now it's time for some sleep. But I'll be ready to jam in the morning! By the way, can I share what I create here, or is that not allowed?

Thanks, y'all! You're the best! 🙌

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Re-iterating TeaHands and Walops points. I think for me the biggest one is to start small. Like..pick something small, and then go smaller than that. I find that it can be useful to set a bronze/silver/gold endpoint for yourself:

Bronze is something you are sure you can complete in the time frame.
Silver is where you think you can get to if you really push yourself and nothing bad happens
Gold is where you can go if everything goes right all the time.

This can help with motivation, because "failing" can often make you stop working because you de-motivated yourself, but not quite reaching your furthest estimation is motivation to push yourself.

Also something to keep in mind is that if you don't make your bronze goal at first, this just means that you have a skill that needs to be improved: scoping. This is something everybody struggles with. I have been a professional gamedev for 10 years and I still scope things to how I think things should go, or I scope time to "feature-complete" (ie it ticks the all the boxes it was supposed to), but not "complete" (there might be bugs, the art doesn't look right/etc..)

Also, version control is super useful, not just for tracking down bugs as Walop called out, but also for motivation. If you commit at least one thing at the end of everyday, you are basically keeping a journal of your work. This can be useful to look back on and realize even if you feel like you didnt get that much done, you can go back and see "hey I actually did all this stuff over the last week!"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This x1000.

Re. Scoping, this is a really useful skill to nurture, that and accurately predicting how much time tasks are going to take you, which really go hand in hand.

Try to set up realistic goals/milestones for all your projects, not only gamejams, the bronze/silver/gold approach (which I'm borrowing if you don't mind) is a really good start, specially for jams, for longer projects you might want to take those and divide them in smaller goals!

Analyze when finishing each task how realistic your time/effort expectations were and eventually you'll nail your estimations more, you'll finish way more games when they don't creep in scope, ask me how I know!

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