How to Get Everything Done in a Game Jam

Today’s question comes from the organisers behind POWER Up! Game Jam.

Making games is hard. Making a game in 48 hours is super hard. But it’s also lots of fun!

Today I’m going to set you up for game jam success. I’ll talk about the development phases of the game jam, the timeline, tools to use, who should be doing production and more. In short, I’ll be doing a roadmap for your game jam. Although we’re talking about game jams, it’s basically the same roadmap principles you’d use to make a bigger game.

Let’s start at the beginning.

A game jam is where you make a game over a short period of time, usually around 48 hours. What’s the most important thing to get right when doing a game jam? Well that depends on what you want to get out of the game jam.

• There are many reasons to do game jams, including: to learn a new skill; meet new people; prototype a game idea you’ve had for ages; pursuing the high of finishing a game; and much more.

I think that no matter what you’re aiming to get out of a game jam, good production is essential. Obviously I’m a bit biased, but hear me out. If you don’t have good production in your game jam you won’t achieve your goals; you’ll get super stressed; and the final game you make will be unplayable.

How can production help? Well, one of the key goals of a producer is to ship games on time.

• Producers look at everything that needs to fit in the game to “finish” it and predict how likely it is that you’ll finish on time.
• Producers also give information to decision makers so they can figure out adjustments to scope, timeline, and budget.
• Producers help team members be more efficient. That is, they help make sure that there aren’t bottlenecks, creating assets is smooth, and generally allow discipline experts to just do what they’re good at rather than dealing with overheads.

If you’re still reading, I’m assuming I’ve convinced you how important production is for a game jam. So what are the essential things to do; how do those things get done; and who actually does the work? Let’s get into it.

What should your team be doing BEFORE the game jam starts?

Before game jam starts decide:

1. which game engine you’ll be using
2. what version control system you’ll use
3. how you’ll track your tasks (ie what production software you’ll use)
   • I’ll talk more about options for this in the “how” section”
4. Who your playtesters will be.
   • If you’re in-person at the game jam, other people will be happy to help out. Just like you should help them out.
   • But if you’re doing an online game jam, line up friends who’ll be available to play your builds.

What should your team be doing DURING the game jam?

What are the different phases of making games and what’s due at the end of these phases? Here’s the big picture version. Let’s look at each of these phases in detail.

Brainstorming phase: what are you going to make?

The big deliverable here is a single design idea. If you can’t narrow it down, choose two that you’ll turn into prototypes.

Prototyping phase: is the idea any good?

Take those design ideas and figure out whether they’ll actually work.

Prototypes for a game jam are more like thought experiments and paper prototypes rather than a literal prototype. At the end of prototyping you should have a clear idea of what you want to build which is likely to be in the form of a prototype build.

Prep for production phase: make sure you know what you’ll be doing and how to do the bulk of the work.

This is one of my favourite phases since it’s where all the production groundwork is laid down.

Based on your prototype you should be able to figure out:

1. Art style
2. Feature list
   • This is hopefully SUPER short and preferably just a single feature.
3. Audio requirements
4. Big picture tasks that need to be done. This is more about the key content that you need.

From that information or in conjunction with gathering that information: figure out how you want to build the game as a team.

There are many different ways to make games and some of them are actually good. I like to talk about vertical vs horizontal development. That is:

1. Horiztonal: do a bit of everything and then polish it and keep iterating.
2. Vertical: do one section fully polished and then move on to the next section and so on.
3. or Hybrid: a combination of both of these approaches.

Check out my previous blog post that goes into detail about what these are. For game jams both approaches can have merit. It depends on the type of game, your goals for the game jam, and what your team is comfortable with.

Using that information you can confirm your phase names, phase-deliverables, and when they’re due. You can use what I’m sharing here as a guideline and pick and choose what works for you.

Next: setup your task board with the big picture tasks backlog, key deliverables, and initial tasks for first thing Saturday.

• Use the information about how you want to build the game to help figure out big blobs of work focus.
• Don’t stress about getting all the details in at this point since they’ll probably change anyways. If you spend too long working on a backlog, that’s a sure sign you’ve got too much work and you won’t be able to finish in time.
• Make sure people know what they’ll be doing first thing on Saturday and everything else can be added later.

Before leaving this phase, make sure you do a sanity check. Can you really do everything that you’re aiming for in one day? What is actually essential for your game, start with that and ignore the rest.

Production: Execute on your plan and actually make the game.

I think things go most smoothly when you create features first and then set up a way to quickly pump out assets. Mid-way through production you should be feature complete. That means no new gameplay mechanics. Then you can spend the rest of the time working on content that uses your features and helps those features shine.

I’d recommend working in 2ish hour “sprints”. That is, choose to focus on something, try to do it, check in and reassess, then choose a new focus. You can do this by setting an alarm and having a team check in together. At each point ask each person one at a time:

1. What has been done? What hasn’t been done? Why not? Do you want to keep going on it? Or give up?
2. What do you expect to get done in the next section of time?
3. What do you need from others and/or need to discuss?

Giving up should not be a negative thing. It’s hard to admit failure, but in doing so you’ll stay focused and be able to move on to more achievable tasks.

To make the process of checking in with each person more streamlined, you could do big picture meeting together and then the producer could talk to each person individually to check on the details and make sure conversations are happening where needed and so on.

At the end of production phase you release your Alpha build: An Alpha build should have all the key game content in, but it might not look great and there will be some big bugs.

At this point you should have a tutorial or a controller map in so that people know how to play the game without you telling them how to outside the game itself.

Alpha phase: intense bug fixing and polish.

This is where a lot of stuff starts happening all at once in a short period of time. You should start with playtesting and also try to get someone on your team to be a dedicated QA person. Everyone else will be bug fixing and polishing assets.

Make sure you add in your credits and title screen.

At the end of Alpha phase you’ll have your Beta Build. A Beta build: might have some big bugs, but everything should be in and looking ok.

Beta phase: fix game blocking bugs or crashes and prep for upload.

At this point you should only fix the big bugs. That is bugs that stop people from playing the game by blocking progress or crashing the games. Ignore all the other little things in case they break more than they fix.

At the end of Beta you’ll have your Release build: which should only have minor bugs and is what you’ll be shipping.

Don’t forget to gather all the details you’ll need for your game jam’s official needs. This is usually team information, game screenshots, videos, descriptions and so on.

Final Upload and launch

This phase is often overlooked and forgotten when budgeting time. But if you don’t upload your game to the official website, then you haven’t really shipped your game.

Leave yourself at least an hour to do this since many other people will be uploading at the same time and upload times might be super slow. You might also encounter some other issue uploading or many other things could happen.

When are you doing this? What is the timeline?

I’m going to assume the most common Game jam timing where the game jam starts with speeches at 6pm on Friday and all games must be submitted by 12pm Sunday.

• In this case, you should be ready for production by the end of Friday night. That means brainstorming, prototype phase and prep for prod phases all need to be done.
• Saturday should be the majority of your production phase.
• Late Saturday night get your Alpha Build ready and test it with people (if you haven’t been doing that throughout the day already).
• On Sunday finish off your Beta Build by 9:30am.
• And then start uploading your Release build by 11am for a 12pm finish.

Here’s what the looks like with hourly blocks for Friday and Sunday and 2-hourly blocks for Saturday.

If you like to work different hours (e.g. stay up late and get up late), adjust when builds are due to match when you’re planning to work.

You can also adjust how long you have for prototyping or some other phase, but you’ll have to remember to take away that time from some other phase. During prep for production, make sure everyone on the team agrees on the phases and deadlines.

How do you do all this? What tools to you use?

All you really need is some sort of task board. Why? Well: at a minimum people need to know:

• When tasks are due so they don’t block someone else.
• What the priority is on tasks (ie what is most important to do next).
• Who is doing the task.
• What the current status of a task is.

If you’re at an in-person game jam, you can create a physical task board. I recommend large pieces of butcher’s paper with sticky notes on it. This is how I did it at a game jam in 2012.

 

If you’re online or just like how powerful online tools can be, you can use whatever your favourite tool is that you already know. Some easy to access software options include: Notion, Trello, Miro, or (if you must) Google Sheets.

Whatever you choose, you can do a lot of the prep work before the game jam even begins.

I personally love Notion (no they’re not paying me). So I’ve created a template for you!

• If you want to have all the deliverables I’ve already spoken about, just duplicate WITH content to your own workspace. I’ve put all the deliverables into the correct phases and estimated sizes of tasks.
• My template allows you to easily triage tasks by priority for when you get to the thorny end of the game jam and realise you can’t do everything.
• Note that Notion costs money for teams with ongoing work. But there’s a free tier that you might be able to make work in one of two ways:
  1. Only have one person sign up and then share the page publicly with the rest of the team. Note in this case team members won’t be able to update their task status themselves.
  2. Try to limit the amount of information you put into Notion so you don’t go over their maximum number of pages & blocks on the free plan.

Who is doing all this production work?

Having a dedicated producer on a team is overkill for most game jam games unless the team is 8 or more people.

1. For most teams you should choose someone who will be a producer part time.
   • It’s best if this isn’t the same person who has the core artistic vision for the game since wishful thinking will raise its ugly head.
   • Make sure the person chosen actually wants to do this work. If they don’t, figure out how to share the load more.
2. If you’re a producer and don’t want to take on any other roles or you’re just starting out in your game production career and want to just focus on that: offer to work with multiple teams to support them.
   • • It’s fairly common that audio people will work on multiple projects, so I don’t see why a producer can’t do the same!

Find a good game jam

How do you find game jams? They happen locally and internationally throughout the year. There are many different ones with a variety of themes based on what is being built and who is doing the building.

• • Global Game Jam is one of the most well known and encourages people to jam in-person in their local cities.
  • If you’re from an under represented group in the games industry, there’s also specialised game jams that are even more welcoming for you. Such as the free, global Power Up game jam for women.

Wrap up time

Don’t forget to reduce and adjust scope. Focus on getting one thing done ok rather than perfection or many things.

It’s a short time, so don’t get caught up in doing it right and following my roadmap blindly. If you miss a bunch of deadlines or steps, no worries. Do what feels right for you and your team and use your gut to see if your goals are impossible.