I survived my first Global Game Jam

How to survive to the Global Game Jam? Even when I have some experience making games, I don't pretend to be an expert, I have just participated in a couple game jams, for the first one (Winter Jam) we didn't finish our game, for the second one (Global Game Jam 2015) we completed Burn & Run Kamikaze Heroes (BARKH), and I am very satisfied with it actually. So, what was the difference?

1. Scope
2. Emergency exit
3. Organization
4. The basic stuff
5. Luck

Scope

We programmers have a mental problem, we are always too optimistic, not necessarily in life but when coding we are. When we started with BARKH's idea we discussed a little about how should we do it, I was planning to do it in a kind of open and dark place, Lal0l thought about it as an auto-generated labyrinth from the beginning, and we were really close to go for it, however we decided to do it just if we would end up with some extra time (yeah sure). So we decided to do a hardcoded labyrinth. I'm pretty sure that do the auto-generated one would take most of our time because of unexpected bugs.

So the tip here is: If you have an idea that sounds kind of complex, but possible. DON'T EVEN DARE TO TRY IT, the Jam have enough things to invest your time on, but discover how stupid you were when you though it was going to be simple it's not a good one. Better to use a temporary version that works and can be thrown away if anything changes in your plans.

Emergency exit

If possible think different ways to make your game a playable game if something terrible happens. Imagine that suddenly they say you will have only the half of the time you originally thought. What would you do? what would be your real scope? can you cut a couple levels? can you remove all those extra abilities and super powers? would your game be playable without them?

Think how could you do your game playable without all this, and make sure the emergency exit is actually easy to follow.

Then if you find out you are running out of time you can go for one of those exits. Remember, it is much better to present a short complete game, than a super cool idea that you didn't finish.

Organization

Well I have not that much to say about this (we were only two in the team :)) however in the previous Jam we were 3 in the team, and I can tell that 3 laptops running Unity were not as useful as two laptops well used in the GGJ. Since only one had Unity installed we made all the Unity stuff in one of them, the other was used for graphics, music, sound, investigate, get resources.

Maybe this piece of advice is obvious in an heterogeneous team, but if you are a bunch of programmers, don't mess with GitHub for a 2 days project, use your resources to get all the other stuff done and ready to be plugged into your game once the main gameplay is done, e.g. the title/credits/gameover screens, the music, the sounds, and so on.

The basic stuff
I think this one is the one which I noticed lacking more in the projects I saw in the jam.

1. Screen flow. A very simple step which makes a huge difference in how a game "feels" is whether it has a complete screen flow, i.e.:
• Title screen - give a good first impression
• <Optional> Story - explain what is the player trying to do, is the player trying to find anything? kill anything? survive? make the player's mission important. If you don't put this screen at least explain the purpose of the game in the gameplay.
• The game - well this one almost nobody forgets about it, those who don't have this are the ones which go and explain that they didn't make it on time.
• <Optional> Game over - show a quick screen when the user dies (not just reboot at the start of the level). It makes the game to feel more complete and you can use it to reinforce the theme of your game, or even make the player laugh and give another try.
• The win - reward your players with a good ending, is the less you can do to thank them for playing your game.
• <Optional> Credits - recognize all those who helped to have the game done.
2. Music & sounds - music and sound makes your game to feel complete, they are not just additional stuff, music helps to give a feeling to the players, and sound give them feedback about the game itself, "was that something good or bad?", "was it an interacting object?", "did I click that button?"...
3. The GAME. Why your game is a game? can I win? can I loose? is it difficult enough to be fun? is it easy enough to be played? does the player have a purpose? is it fun? Of course that some types of games don't really need all this, but most of them do.
4. The theme. How is your game related to the jam's theme? The theme is a tool to push you in new ways of thinking, I mean, if the theme is pushing you to make a bad game obviously you need to keep thinking and bounce ideas with other people. The theme could push you to learn new stuff, if you only know to do Mario-style platformers, then doing something similar is fine but the theme could help you to explore from other perspective, instead of just make another Mario.

Luck

Certainly you might need a bit of luck, for example the day that the GGJ began my computer's hard disk crashed, it got damaged so I couldn't bring my computer with Unity to the jam. That seemingly not really nice coincidence forced us to do what I explained in the point above about organization.

Will you find good a team? will you find those free resources you need? will your brain want to work and give you a marvelous idea? will your computer explode?

My advice: a positive attitude to whatever happen in there will make the difference between a really awesome weekend and two days of frustration :).

Hope this help you for your next jam!