Global Game Jam 2023: A Retrospective

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Game jams have been an inspiration to how I view game design ever since I first learned about them roughly a decade ago. I was fascinated by the stories of how games I loved in high school like Surgeon Simulator, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, and Superhot. It was unfathomable to me how anyone could make something like a game, with so many moving pieces and required assets, in such small amounts of time. Now that I have the skills, tools, and knowledge to participate in game jams myself, I can't say I've gotten any closer to understanding game jams; however, being a part of them has helped me to better understand the process of game development as a whole.

Global Game Jam 2023 was my third opportunity to participate in one of these jams, and after taking some time to properly digest my experience I can safely say it was by both the most hectic and most fun. In this particular jam, participants were given a mere 48 hours to construct a team, form an idea based on a prompt, and develop a game (or, considering the time constraint, a mess of code and assets loosely resembling one).

This jam had three major differences for me as opposed to the previous events I had joined into:

• This jam's unique prompt was on "roots".

• It was the first time I actually got to attend a jam in-person, instead of remote via Discord.

• This event was the first time I had gone without a pre-made team.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, differences in theme, setting, and situation made for a big shift in how I interacted with this jam. Even from the moment I joined, it almost ended up feeling more like an experiment, with the previous jams being a sort of control group for me. It was these changes that inspired me during the event's course to take as many out-of-the-box approaches as I could come up with. It was through this approach that I got to the first of my major takeaways from the event.

1) A "weird" approach is not a bad approach so long as I embrace it.

This takeaway was, especially in the early phases of the jam, the most important one for me. I had done the last two events very methodically, to varying results; I had planned in advance, formed a team beforehand, and talked basically exclusively to my team for those 48 hours. But in this jam, I had done none of that! I had joined very spontaneously on the suggestion of a friend, and as a free agent I had to embrace what opportunities I was provided. When the teamless participants all grouped, we found that there were 15 artists and only 3 engineers (myself included). The three engineers (Ryder Heidelberger, Devin Siegfried, and myself) would be a unique group all to our own, and would work concurrently on all of these projects that the now three groups of five artists each would create. Rather than making a game for the jam, I would be making three.

From left to right: Ryder, Devin, and myself. 4:44 AM, February 4 (~12 hours into development).

The experience was grueling and chaotic-- keeping communications smooth between three completely different teams while getting only 4 hours of sleep over the course of 3 days is not an experience I think I could handle twice in a month. That being said, I had an absolute blast, and all three games came out relatively playable! I don't think any of it could've gone as well as it did if it weren't for the confidence we all had in the plan; to say "we can" is to say "we will", and I wholeheartedly believe that without that optimism we would have been dead in the water.

2) Communication is key, but that means sometimes I need to initiate it.

Something I often had to remind myself during the college projects I led the engineering team in was that not only is it okay to speak up, but that speaking up is the only way I can ensure my thoughts on how things should be done will be properly represented. I think the benefits of good communication are more pronounced in-person, as you get direct immediate feedback and have a lot more tools at your disposal. Good communication was one thing I really tried to put effort into during this jam, and I think it paid off well! I'm particularly proud of the engineer-to-engineer design talks we had on the first day. As an engineer who often works around artists, it was a breath of fresh air to be in the room with people who really understood the strange ways in which I would convey my thoughts, and to not only have them understood but challenged and added to was fascinating to me.

Two whiteboards the three of us engineers filled in the first day over an 8 hour period, displaying design concepts for each of the three games worked on by the team. Each color is a different engineer.

The communication didn't just stop with the engineers, though. I made a consistent effort to check on each of the three teams every couple hours or so to make sure we stayed up-to-date on what each team was working on at any given time. We also made sure to have at least one engineer in our designated room at any given time, so that whenever any of the teams had a question we would be able to help immediately. These efforts proved fruitful, as we were able to keep the miscommunications to a minimum and the time spent bogged down by technical issues low. A development team is more than just your specific section; branch out, and make sure you're all on the same page.

3) Working like a machine is efficient, but don't forget to be a person.

The last takeaway is one I often struggle with, both as a perfectionist and as someone with ADHD; when I get involved in a project that catches my interest, I get completely absorbed in my work. I never like leaving things half-finished, which is an extremely slippery slope in a game project where everything you work on is only part of a larger unit! That kind of thinking took its toll on me very quickly during the jam, to the point where by day 2 I was almost starting to feel hungover just from lack of sleep (or much rest in general). Thankfully, I had all these new and old friends at the jam to set me right. They looked out for me-- reminding me to take a nap, inviting me to go on walks, setting up group meals. Without these little reminders, I don't think I would have kept such a positive mood and productive pace.

What you should also take from this is not that you should constantly have people around you making certain you take care of your needs-- that's primarily a job for yourself, and it's something I'm still improving on. But what you should take from this is that those needs do exist, and they're more than just needing to eat, sleep, and use the restroom. Get active, take a small break, find an activity to take you out of the grinding headspace for a bit!

A fun group outing on the morning of day two, featuring artists and engineers from a majority of the location's participating teams.

Overall, I'm just proud of what we made and the teams I made them with. Everybody put in the time and effort to make sure their work was as good as they could make it, and I'm very grateful to see such a concerted effort like that. Everybody had such faith in every other member of their team to do what they needed to do, and honestly I don't remember the last time I saw that level of trust in any of my development teams thus far. On top of that, it was so nice to regroup with old alumni friends and meet so many new kind faces! It may have been a very last-minute decision to join into this event, but after the experience I had I can safely say I'll be joining onto the next one well in advance.