Log #9: Sep/28/2024

• Participating in my first Game Jam!
• Working with new people
• Using Netlify to host websites
• Randomization Decimation and Poor Designing

Previously on this blog, I left you all, my loyal readers, without an entry for September 13. Unfortunately, my memory evades me. I believe I spent that day trying to work out details of "Phase 2" of our team's (main) project, but I didn't get around to writing the entry for it, and I didn't get to that over the weekend, either. I guess it's a good reminder that if I let something slip between the cracks, I might just not see it again.

I planned to be productive and do more thorough design work for our game when I arrived on Monday. However, our usual routine was shaken up with something new: a game jam. A game jam is a short (usually competitive) event to make a game based on a prompt within a short amount of time. We were given a break from our main projects for the next week to make a game for the prompt "Paralyzed!". Immediately, people began scrambling to figure out who they wanted to work with and what they wanted to do. I set my work for our main game aside and thought, "what am I gonna do?"

Recently, I had been inspired by a film project a friend of mine had done. I like making movies, so what if I did something with that? Already, I had someone insterested. A good friend of mine was also not experienced with programming, so we began forming an idea that used YouTube videos and websites, an idea that did not involve complex programming.

One thing other people did right off the bat was make mini pitches for their projects. I heard a designer's pitch and was interested. The designer's idea revolved around a kid who was soon to die, and the letters they would recieve as they approached the end of their life. Really serious stuff, but I was drawn to it. We began talking.

Me, my friend, the designer, and the designer's friend all talked about a project we could do together. I suggested the mixed mediums, and we discussed what the story should be. However, I felt that maybe I should have not gotten involved in their project. I decided that I did not want to do a story that covered such a heavy topic. But having spent a good amount of time talking, and with so little time to make a game, I felt roped to this group. Instead of immediately bringing up my concerns, I tried to pose other, similar ideas. Eventually, I confessed that I did not want to make a super serious game, but the others were willing to change their ideas, and go with something a bit sillier. From there, we discussed a basic plot (completely different from the other designer's initial idea), and the designer was tasked with coming up with more of the story.

Already, I was nervous we had spent too much time talking about what to do. Additionally, everyone else decided that a visual novel was what they wanted to make. This was not what I had initially planned, and reluctantly, I began to shift away from the original website-based idea. The next day, a new person joined our crew as a programmer. We continued to spend the second day talking about what medium we were going to use to make the game. We discussed using something called Ren.py, a software for visual novels to make our game. However, I protested, and we decided to rethink our idea. After bringing up the idea to the new programmer and with everyone else, we actually pivoted to telling the story through websites. Almost like a fractured visual novel... without much visuals.

Perhaps I should have been more willing to work on other people's ideas. Perhaps I should have been more upfront about my opposition to making a heavy-themed story... I think something for me to take away from this process is that I should not be afraid or hesitant to state the ideas that I don't want to compromise. But whatever I "should" have done, we had a medium and rough story, so I worked on a team Taiga page, and began trying to work out what our basic idea needed.

From here, the days kinda blurred together. Throughout all of this, there is something that I really wish I done differently. I did not make a clear "game plan". We did not have a super clear list of everything that needed made, and we were still tweaking ideas throughout most of the jam. I think our coordination and efficiency would have been greatly improved if we had a clear roadmap early on.

A big detail helped us out however. The game jam deadline was extended by a week! Because of some events going on in our building, our productivity would likely be reduced, and it was decided that we could use that week to finish up any last touches as the other things in our building happened. Our team made good use of that second week.

We spent time filming together, and everybody did some writing work. Technically, we were all visual artists as well, and I even got to format some fake math homework! I worked on css and html, the other programmer being more on the javascript side of things. Our artists made graphics, and our other designer did lots of writing work.

Things were not only glee and chummyness though, as I previously mentioned. Because of my lack of planning, I wasted a lot of time twiddling around with css and html, tweaking things, because I was uncertain what exactly needed to be done. We were also plagued by randomization, our attentions being divided amongst each other's different issues and multi-person projects. Making a clearer game plan would have been my job, but I never fully did this. We did put things on our Taiga, but I don't think it was ideal. Even on the last day, everything we needed to do was somewhat haphazardly split across the Taiga. But, with help from our team's other designer, we had enough of a plan to finish a compelete-ish story.

We actually had to rebrief some of us near the end of the game jam, because the story was not clear to everybody. We were not the most organized.

Also because of our problems, we were frequently without clear tasks for our artists. And because our website weren't clearly designed, our programmer did not have a super clear to-do list either. All around, I think time was wasted because there was not a clear idea of everything that needed to be done. I think if I had clear plan of the "complete" game written out, everything would be easier, -including coming up with new features and art if people had completed their tasks. People would have better known what to work on if they knew the full context. There would have been a lot less time wasting if people knew how everything would fit together and what a feature more precisely needed to be.

I think I've made it clear that this was a learning proceess for me. Despite my dramatic regret rant, we managed to produce a thing, and a pretty impressive, funny, weird thing too! I'm happy with our finished project, and I think everyone had (at least a little bit of) fun while working on the project. We got to do film, improv, visual art, written art, and cryptography. And we turned the project in on time!

Me and my friend stayed up way too late working on the project the day before the deadline to make sure the pages we had planned out got finished. Of course, after we submitted the project, as I was showing the game to my sister, I found an basically game-breaking error in one part of our project. And thus, another important detail for game making was revealed to me: have someone else playtest the game before you submit it. For now, I'm hoping I can convince the jam's host (our teacher) to let me posthumously edit the game to fix the problem. In the meantime, I don't know if anybody will actually get to that part of the game anyways...

Even though there were bumps along the way, seeing my friends play our game is so awesome! It's cool to have other people care about your project. While I think the finished project is unpractically difficult (in ways that are not fun and simply technical), people seem to enjoy it so far. I can't wait to see if anybody can decipher the story!

If you're interested in the project, you can learn more here: The ocCulinary Club

And I think... that's all for now folks!

-Luke Knotts