Stuck in a Game Jam
Someone shares an idea about a game where you suck up *!@% with your butt and puke un-chewed food because it fits the theme of the game jam; “the other way around”. People banter and joke about the idea for a bit too long. Meanwhile somebody else is eager to share a more loose idea about using the reflection of water and tying that to the theme of the game jam somehow. We’re too tired to try and make sense of that suggestion after two hours of brainstorming. There’s something wrong with every idea, we don’t know what we’re doing, even though some of us have been to a lot of game jams before.
The reason that we struggle to get going is that somebody in the group might be too quick to dismiss ideas or we get caught up on flaws. It becomes tense to share an idea so to lighten the mood we try to make each other laugh by hatching silly ideas. Then we get caught in a cycle of lightening the mood by joking around. Some people might take turns doing serious thinking and when their idea is rejected they as well feel like they need to lighten the mood.
If you’re unlucky it’s likely that you will end up bringing one of these jokes to life. Then you might find yourself working on something even though there’s no reason at all for you to do so; you’re not learning anything, it’s not fun to make and it’s too obnoxious for your portfolio. You’re just trying to finish it in time for the deadline and then you will never show it to anyone again. You wish you could restart the game jam or that you would have stayed home with proper food instead of fast-noodles.
I have been to about 10 game jams. The jams that don’t go well usually follow that pattern.
In another jam in a group of strangers we also struggled a while to come up with something. I had a rough idea in my head that I knew would be a decent game because it was heavily based on something that already existed. I meant to make it myself some day. I proposed it anyway to see if it would help us out of this cycle. It worked that time. There was the right people in the team, to do this thing, in that amount of time, on that day.
Other times I have come to jams with friends who are also developers. We didn’t prepare ideas ahead of time and the results varied widely despite the same group of people. Often we wouldn’t stress to finish for the deadline because it was just fun to make something together and hang out. Which was a pain for the organizers who wanted us to participate in the showcase to end the jam (sorry about that).
The best you can do is to come prepared with something you believe in, either people or an idea. To make sure you have a nice game by the end it is best to have everything prepared. But the thrill of a game jam is that you don’t know what situation you will end up in or what you will get out of it. Embrace that and think of them as adventures instead of a game where you win if you finished making a product.
