In the realms of engineering, a Hackathon is an event where people work against a clock to build something from scratch. These can happen with physical making or with software development, and they can happen as in-person events or events conducted over the internet. Game Jams are a specific type of hackathon, where the thing being made is–you guessed it–a video game.
I have personally participated in one proper IRL hackathon: an overnight affair locked in a room with friends and strangers, substituting sleep for burritos and Monster energy (I was a much younger man at this time). More importantly for this blog post however, I have participated in a good many online Game Jams. While this type of event is not for everyone, they have been both a source of creative inspiration and have helped me change my mindset about game development for the better.
I’d like to talk about how game jams have helped impact the way I develop games, lessons I’ve learned from them, and the role I see for them in Daikon’s strategy.
Time management
Game Jams are typically time-limited, to varying degrees. Because I value my sleep, as I’ve gotten older I tend to prefer participating in jams with longer time limits (a week, or maybe ten days, as opposed to 48 or 72 hours). In either case though, to create an entire game from scratch in a limited amount of time means you’ll want to do two things: make a smart plan, and be selective in what you work on.
Before I learned these lessons, in my early attempts at game jams, I would just wing it. While this is fun, it doesn’t typically result in an end product that feels much like a game, maybe something closer to a tech demo
Above is a screenshot from Selkie, a game I made in April 2016 for Ludum Dare #35, a 3-day game jam whose theme was “Shapeshift”. On the idea of shapeshifting, I built a game around the mythological Selkie which is a creature that can appear as a human woman or a seal. I think I had two pretty good ideas going into this jam. 1: to automatically be in seal-form whenever you are underwater, and automatically in human-form when above water, and 2: that one of your powers in human form should be luring clueless men with your womanly wiles (to steal fish from them of course).
I spent a lot of the time during that jam making 3D art, and working on visual effects for the underwater segments. I think as a more experienced game-jammer I would probably have prioritized gameplay and design first, better yet I would have decided on an art style that was easier to get good results in quicker (likely 2D pixel art given that has become my specialty). Since I didn’t spend my time that wisely, I was able to implement a bare-minimum version of the core ideas, but that’s just about all there is to it.
Time management in the game jam setting is very relevant to how Daikon Games is run nowadays. As game development is a part-time hobby, I am always looking for most impactful ways to spend the small amount of time I can find for game development (usually measured in single-digit hours per week, or so). Making smart design choices ahead of time, reusing code or assets when possible, implementing tools that speed up design iteration, and not being afraid to scrap something if it’s not coming together right are all skills I’ve honed over years of game jams that I apply to my day-to-day Daikon Games work.
Experimentation
One of my favorite things about a game jam is that it is an opportunity for experimentation. When you are in the midst of a large, established project, the best thing to do is to stick to what you know. But a game jam is a great time to throw caution to the wind, expanding your toolkit of techniques and making you a better developer.
My favorite example of this in my game jamming history is Roll & Break, pictured above. This was created in just 48 hours for the gm(48) game jam, in January 2021. I experimented with three things in this jam that were entirely new to me: pre-rendered 3D art, GameMaker’s physics engine, and tile manipulation in GameMaker.
Pre-rendered 3D is a technique where you make 3D artwork, but rather than rendering it in real-time in your game, you take 2D pictures of the 3D art from various angles, and then put it into the game in place of traditional 2D art. The result looks 3D-ish, with a bit of a pleasantly uncanny feel. It was most popular in the late 16-bit console era, with famous examples being Donkey Kong Country and Sonic 3D Blast. I made the art here in Blender, and set up a consistent camera angle and lighting for rendering, outputting flat PNG files and using those in-game as sprites and tilemaps.
As far as tile manipulation goes, I had never touched it in GameMaker prior to this game. Here I use it to detect when Roland (the armadillo protagonist) has rolled over a tile, so i can change it to a cracked tile and finally delete it altogether. While I was just finding my sea-legs with it in this project, tile-based collisions and tile-manipulation has become the primary way that I handle things in modern Daikon Games projects such as The Song of Asirra and Chico’s Rebound, so learning about the technique here in the safe-space of a game jam was crucial to enhancing the way I work.
Game Jams can also be a fun time to just experiment with using a new Game Engine or technology stack entirely. The game pictured above is Sky Sky Panic Re:Growth which I created in 10 days for Luxe Jam #1, using the Luxe game engine whose private beta I was given access to. And while not part of an official scheduled game-jam event, I did a self-imposed 3-day experiment to try out the Godot game engine with Serpent3D.
Farming ideas for full game releases
The last big upside I’ll talk about with regards to game jams is that it can be a place to test out ideas that may one day lead to full game releases. The most obvious example is Chico and the Magic Orchards. While this ended up being Daikon Games’ first full commercial release, it’s no secret that it actually began life as a game jam entry.
The first version of Chico and the Magic Orchards was created in 10 days for Retrograde Jam 2. The theme of this jam is just to create something as retro-feeling as possible, I opted for a classic Game Boy look and feel because I have a ton of personal nostalgia for that era of gaming. I didn’t expect at the time that I would turn it into my first full commercial release, but the positive response to the game and the relatively restrained scope made me feel like it was a great candidate for expanding on. Of course it ended up getting very positive reviews, even launching on Nintendo Switch, and essentially making Daikon Games possible at all.
There are other game jams I’ve done in the past that I feel are great candidates for making a full game out of, and that I may one day return to and expand on, such as Keeper of the Flame and Osmudo
In closing
Game jams are a lot of fun. They’re an opportunity to experiment, they’re a test-bed for new ideas, they’re a way to improve your development skills as a whole. They may not be for everyone, but they’re definitely for me, and I see myself participating in many more to come. One of the best and simplest things about them is that they’re simply an excuse to work on something entirely new and different for a while, and refresh the brain.
I haven’t participated in a game jam in over a year, mostly because things have just been so busy, but game jams are really part of Daikon Games’ DNA. There will be more to come, and I think it would be a lot of fun to host my own some day. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these musings on the topic! We’ll talk again soon