My First Game Jam

Some thoughts upon finishing my first game jam.

I'm an over-thinker. Generally, I beat an idea to death before actually building anything from it. Or, more often, not building anything from it. That seems like the opposite of a game jam. After poking around a bit, I found the The Cozy Autumn Game Jam which seemed pretty chill. So I signed up for that.

The Puzzle

I thought this might be a puzzle game when I started, but I wasn't sure. As I was brainstorming autumn-themed stuff, I kept coming back to this raking mechanic. So I implemented the rake movement. That seemed like some fun motions. Then I added a grid of leaves for the rake to destroy.  Watching the rake cut a swath through the leaves was pretty satisfying. So I spent a long time wandering around whacking leaves and trying to find the puzzle hidden in there.

Maybe you can't rake the same spot twice without damaging the grass? Maybe leaves keep falling and filling in the least-recently-raked areas? Maybe different leaves need different number of hits to get rid of them? Lots of different options, and I couldn't prove that any of them would be fun or interesting before building them. So I just took a leap and decided to go down the hit-all-the-leaves-but-don't-hit-the-notleaves path and hope for the best.

Later on I decided to vary rake size, stroke length, and turning radius from puzzle to puzzle. I think this gave enough variety for a small puzzle game. But I don't think it's deep enough to run with it much further than I did here. There's probably too much repetition in the earlier levels as it is.

No Model

I've written a lot of code that *solves* puzzles and real world puzzle-like problems. The first step is to build a model of the problem.  Then you can write code that explores/solves/tests the problem. For puzzle games, this is super useful generating levels, finding optimal solutions, etc. But again with the overthinking.

So there's no underlying model here. The rake object is colliding with the leaf objects and they are the actual game objects, not just UI reflections of an underlying model. There are definite downsides to this, which are probably outside the scope of this post. And those downsides probably just don't matter for a small exploratory game jam game that a handful of people will play.

So live and learn. I should probably do more first drafts like this before building robust models for the real, you-gotta-maintain-this thing.

What I Learned

It's probably too early to draw a lot of conclusions, since the jam's not even over. (Maybe I'll find something I want to add to Leafvember before the end date!) 

But I did have fun building a jam game. It's a first draft, but I know people will see it. That's a combination that I have always avoided. But I think it's been good for me and I want to do it again.