My First Game Jam: What I Learned From Making a Video Game in 7 Days

Hey there, today I’m gonna tell you about my insane first Game Jam experience, share what I learned, and illustrate our team’s journey for you.

It’s been a while since I made up my mind that my ultimate life goal should be to found a creative studio and work together with my art friends to realize projects together. Since many of us, including myself, have a big interest in all things gaming (and some even have quite the experience at developing games), it felt natural, in order to prepare and test out our capabilities, but most of all gain valuable knowledge about the process of creating and publishing as a team, to participate in some Game Jams together.

Now, for some in my group this is not really anything new, and we have some veterans who already have about 5 jams on their resumé, even working together before. For others - me, I am others - it was a first.

One of the most important notes to put right at the beginning of all this:

The Game Jam does not start with the theme announcement.

It actually starts weeks, in our case months, in advance!

Here’s a rundown.

1. Choose the Right Jam!

This one’s super important, because you need something that ideally aligns with everyone’s scheduling. You should probably choose something beginner-friendly that is not too specific and that has a lot of participants too, so you can expect a lot of momentum and excitement building.

With that in mind, make sure everyone you want to participate with is prepared to spend some extra hours during jam time, knows important details, and the likes.

Personally, we created a Discord server for our jam, which was a very helpful tool.

2. Get Everyone Hyped, Prepped and Organized

To hype my group up, I actually designed cute graphics and even ordered T-shirts for them, to get them hyped up. I wrote in our server regularly as well and spoke much about the jam.

When the voting for themes was announced, we pushed a little for everyone to give their votes and talked about ideas and concepts for themes.

As for prepping: you can go through the most important details beforehand, assign general task fields, and evaluate everyone’s strengths and skills.

Lastly, a solid setup (engines and programs installed, an order on the cloud for file sharing ready, and resources downloaded on individual PCs) was crucial to our process.

Here’s where it gets tricky and sometimes frustrating.

It took quite some poking, trial and error, and reminders to get every setup prepped and jam-ready. In the end, it worked out just fine and saved tons of hours of jam time.

The prep work you do is actually such a recipe for success, IMO! Invest time here and you’re gonna thank your past self later on!

3. Prepare the Party!

Of course, a proper party with music and drinks is gonna be a little much, but if you are planning on getting together to brainstorm and work for the first day (which I honestly can’t recommend enough), you better prepare accordingly.

Snacks, energy drinks, and a whiteboard go a very long way to get people hyped up, brain juices flowing, and set the vibe just right.

Now, if you’re all set in the prep area, there’s only one thing you can do:

Wait for your theme, have a meetup on day 1, and start working on your project right away!

If you want to know how this crucial first day went, I actually reported on the entire first day in great detail: (for privacy reasons, every one in the Team has been assigned a codename :P)

The Quiet Before the Storm

Everything is prepared - bowls of brain food and snacks for the team on a neatly arranged table, Cat’s long desk now reorganized so multiple people can work at it at once, a digital tool for workflow and communication already installed on all our PCs.

Lastly, the blank surface of the 2x160m solid glass whiteboard Cat and Gleepglorp hauled all the way from a nearby city apartment where the guy who was selling it lived, through multiple trains and bus rides, up to what for this week will become the one and only KO-Headquarter.

With everything in place and waiting, excitement builds.

What is gonna be the theme for the week?

Will we be able to work together as a team?

Can we realize our idea and make the concept we come up with into an actual video game?

Hello, I am Dinosaur, and this week I will be producing a video game!

My friends and I have been enjoying the act of creation in numerous ways, and all of us are connected through a deep love for gaming - especially together.

This past year has been really special for our group because some of us have really gotten into coding and game-making. Cat, who is something of a senior in that field, has taught members of our team the basics of game-making. They have had their own tries at realizing some small projects, but now it is time to get the band together and put new skills to the test!

If you’re wondering - what is my role in all of this?

Then, well… so have been I.

As I am neither particularly adept at programming nor digital art, roping me into the project is not quite as intuitive as with some other members of our small team.

Cat and Tomato have been jamming games for years and have become a tried-and-true team. Gleepglorp really got into it the last Game Jam too, but was lacking the skills to participate in full. He changed that and for the jam will be our greatest newcomer.

Kraken is gonna be an interesting addition to the team too! He’s been studying the blade, so as to say, on his own and later alongside Gleepglorp under the wise council of Cat.

Lastly, a secret weapon: Knife.

Our prime digital artist - machine.

She can really pump out highest-grade digital artworks at scale and transforms a game into a visual stunner.

With this lineup, what could go wrong?

But to get back to the question about my role in all of this: well, there’s some things I’m decent at, and they involve bringing folks together, hosting them, and providing a coordinated platform to fully realize their creative potential.

I’m decent enough at project management and coordinating a moderately socially awkward, shy yet brilliant group and, to be quite frank, telling them what to do to get things done - something Cat alike excels at.

Thus I proclaimed myself producer, set up a lovely office at our place, and organized a fuck ton of snacks, coffee, and energy drinks.

Now Onto Our Somewhat Insane Day of Game Jamming Together

Half an hour until 12, the usual: no one’s ready, two people can’t be there in person and have to join via video call, the setup is still lacking, and I totally did not prepare a schedule or anything.

Instead: meme compilations on the TV, everyone’s carrying my cats around and putting them down in random places (they love the attention), and I accidentally had a coffee right after an energy drink and my ADHD is acting up.

The timer for the start of the Game Jam jumps wildly in 15-minute increments, and while I am still setting up the video call for our two homebound colleagues, Cat screams:

“THE THEME IS TRUST NO ONE!”

Huh?

It gets quiet and everyone looks a little puzzled.

Trust no one?

I didn’t really expect that.

So, turns out, most of us didn’t.

So, quite unprepared, I scramble to catch my bearings and organize everything I’d planned out.

Let’s get to it then!

10 minutes later, all enter a 30-minute solo brainstorming session to think of a concept and develop an elevator pitch to present to the group.

After we have heard all the ideas, we ponder, discuss, clear up questions, and I try to point out similarities in different concepts and we search for overlap.

Finally, we put it to the vote, which at first looks like a perfect tie between every single idea.

Perfect.

Some time later, we settle on a concept and start working out the actual gameplay loop, but meet our first big hurdle:

We can’t figure something out that aligns with our likes, the general theme, scope, and isn’t a perfect copy of an existing game.

The first setback demonstrated perfectly how you can be exceedingly well prepared and even come up with a really exciting idea, but still have to end up scrapping it entirely.

We make the decision to go on lunch break, and that is when actual productivity starts.

I think when you’re in a heated discussion, it can get quite hard to not enter tunnel vision and unstuck yourself. Taking this break allowed all of us to get some distance, mull things over, and clear our heads.

We came to the decision that the current idea was not our pitch and chose another, more suited one of our concepts to pursue further.

This provided much more clear direction for a gameplay loop and allowed us to enter a way more productive phase right away after lunch.

Fleshing the second concept out provided us with some plans on which we could get started right away, such as prototyping, entering the concept art phase, and even some loose hints at a story and hook which our writers would be able to build upon.

Of course, the second idea had its challenges too, and there were some points our group immediately heavily struggled with.

Did you know it is incredibly hard to align a big group’s visions of a game they have in their heads with each other and make it into common ground you can build upon?

It’s a shame thought transmission is not commercially available yet.

Still, we found our workarounds and were able to put down an actual foundation for our submission in the end.

In the later half of the day, we were even able to really get started in productive areas and some groundwork for code was put down, as well as first but already really cool artworks being drawn.

We also noted the current flaws and areas we need to flesh out heavily for the upcoming days, but at least all of us could get to work and bring the project forward.

It is now late on our first day and we already faced many challenges, one of them being, for me, to put down all thoughts about the game, give my fried brain a break, and just let everything marinate overnight.

Most of all, I think I really like this project.

I believe we have some great ideas and I love the first visual creations.

I’m ready to give this my all and if it doesn’t work out - at least have a blast trying!

The Rest of the Week

Starting with day 2, however, it became somewhat apparent: there would be absolutely no more time for lengthy documentation.

We were in the thick of it now, and every hour counted!

On the second day of our jam, we made first progress, but also learned the hard way that now that we weren’t together as a team anymore, unable to directly communicate every second, we’d be facing some challenges.

One of my first takeaways from those early days:

People can’t look inside other people’s heads.

The second lesson:

People are constantly changing their minds, processing and developing, and even if you think you were settled on something, that might look entirely different the next day.

Lesson 3:

It’s not all that easy to keep up with the current visions and status, and constant updates and communication are necessary.

Even if it might involve some minor confrontation.

Scary, I know!

Beyond a very natural and healthy amount of minor difficulties and challenges, I was beyond surprised by how naturally everything came together.

Somehow, almost all the participants had found their niche and processes to be productive and get the game further every day.

By day 3, we worked together like a well-oiled machine.

At day 4, the game started taking on shape.

I was amazed!

Although a really big team, working together became very efficient, and the team worked hard day and night.

I rarely remember a time where I have been this productive and creative in such a short amount of time.

I think everyone had truly found a passion, only dampened now and then by pangs of self-doubt and perhaps a tinge of perfectionism.

In a team with lots and lots of extremely talented people, I think it might feel harder to live up to the general standard.

No matter, I feel the team exceeded all expectations and even within the short week made some serious progress.

I couldn’t be more proud!

The Final Stretch

Nearing the end of our deadline was when some other issues arose.

Free music is almost entirely AI.

It’s.

All.

Slop.

At least if you’re not all that deep into the whole sound library thing.

Thus, I’ve felt my purpose as a bit of a manager person was to find people who could fix that.

That’s where some interesting connections from art school came into play!

I remembered a deeply talented friend who I knew had been getting into some serious music biz for a couple of years now and also had a love for video games, but creative projects in general even more so.

Thus, an evening call, one overly excited elevator pitch with much unprofessional but very enthusiastic squealing later, he was on board and composed a wonderful track for our game the same night!

I was moved by his spontaneous helpfulness enough that I had tears in my eyes listening to the track.

Thus, developments had once again brought us further towards our own unique game, and my next challenge would be: challenge someone else from the team to pull an all-nighter to record all of our very own foley.

What can I say, it was a full success, and they concocted a mix of recordings that hit the spot just right for our game.

By that time, art production had nearly finished, the game was in early stages of playtesting, and unfortunately our main digital artist had fallen ill with a cold.

As their last tribute, they had created a beautiful thumbnail for the game, and we were all happy to release them to their well-deserved rest.

There were still tons of last-minute things to do, and I think the most common mistake every single jammer makes is not leaving enough time for playtesting, but also not getting any external people to playtest the game.

We did what we could with the time we had, and our programmer was down in the trenches until the very last second.

In the end, perhaps somehow cramming that extra playtest time might have improved ranking performance, but to us, the game was gorgeous, quite polished, and beautifully unique to us all.

In only 7 days (but a combined roundabout of 400h of work), we had created our beautiful baby:

Mythomania.

A labyrinth game exploring the concept of lies, with a gameplay loop centred around receiving riddled directions that have to be untangled, which build upon each level.

The Last Stages

The last stages of my jam week included primarily the design of our web page for the game, a bunch of banners and promo for socials (I really wanted to do some mockup promo since I knew it would be a skill more than useful for future projects), writing a text for it (that, in hindsight, was a catastrophe for actually explaining how you play the game, but welp, it was still modifiable later on anyways and a good lesson for the next jam), and eventually playing and rating other games.

In the end, we made the top 20 percent of the jam, but honestly, that was the least interesting thing about the entire project to me.

What actually had a stellar impact on me was how together we could actually finish something that’s still so amazing and grand to me like our very own video game.

How we gave it our all and had visible payoff.

How we learned so many new things and skills, as well as lessons about working together.

If before this I was an agnostic about my own future, a future in which I dream of working full-time in a creative studio with these wonderful people, I now am not only a believer, I am the literal pope and I PREACH!

With people this talented, this hard-working, consistent, and enthusiastic, anything is possible.