Jam-Mortem

The Kenney Jam (and voting period) is over, and I found this experience to be very educational and far less discouraging than I originally expected. The jam’s theme was “exploration”, and I ended up making a game called subUrban Explorer, which is supposed to be about exploring the city you live in. Here were the judging results (out of 460 entries):

Not bad for my first game that wasn’t made following a tutorial!

I was able to stick to my original plan of not staying awake for 48 straight hours, or taking meals at the computer. Just 15 hours of development/day, and 8 hours of sleep/night (the jam started at 5am so those numbers make sense don’t worry about it). I took a shower. I saw some sunlight. I listened to an obscene amount of Gus Dapperton, The Band CAMINO, and various anime theme songs.

I also learned a few lessons along the way:

• The Unity Editor is not the game. This was a very hard-learned lesson, because it turned out that there was a game-wrecking visual bug I was unaware of until I built and ran the game. By then it was too late for me to fix. I’m not saying my abysmal Presentation and Gameplay scores were totally because of this, but it certainly didn’t help.
• The importance of shaders (see: above). I spent 15 hours the day after submitting my game trying to fix the visual bug. Google could provide me no relief or answers. It turned out that the player character avatar was using an unlit shader, while every other object used a standard shader, and that broke the game for reasons I do not yet comprehend. Once I changed the player shader, everything was hunky dory.
• I have a tendency to think too big. I don’t mean that as a brag, I mean that in the sense that my game felt empty and boring because the map space was simply too large to fill out in a 48 hour jam.
• I’m absorbing more than I thought I was. To be clear, I am still not where I would like to be, but I was actually able to implement some ideas without needing to window hop back and forth between VS Code and Google. Small victories are still victories.
• Negative feedback is very helpful, but I am still a baby. There was one comment on my game that was more overtly negative than the rest, and it actually gave me the push I needed to make a specific change I had already wanted to make, and I think it greatly improved the game. However, it had the same effect on me that a rude customer at the bar would have had, gnawing at me for way longer than it should have. Really gonna need to develop thicker skin for just my own wellbeing.
• It’s hard to let something be bad. I keep telling myself that I am done tinkering with this game, then coming back and making changes hours later (I did it again while writing this post). There are so many other things I want to fix so badly but if I don’t restrain myself this crappy game is going to become my life.
• Making games is fun. There were a million small and obvious lessons I thought of ending the list with, but this was the one I liked the best. I just had a really fun time being completely absorbed in this jam.

Until next time!