With GMTK Game Jam 2024 voting officially closing and the results already out, I felt the need to write something about my overall experience in one of the first game jams I’ve participated in (it’s basically the second game jam) and the lessons I learned from it. And of course, how else can you learn if you don’t breakdown and over-analyze your mistakes.

So for starters, this is the sketch of the game idea I came up with for the jam and here’s the messy result we created:
Hungry Hungry Space Hippo Game Page
Just to give a greater context I suppose and so that you can see why we were able to push through some of its ideas and why we failed to cover most of them

1. Prioritizing Assets over Prototype

As the person on the team having the most experience at art, I thought I could focus on the art and just maybe be a little support for the coding of the game. Little did I know that I would still have to end up coding a lot of the game since we are inexperienced devs in a tight schedule. I spent the majority of 2-3 days working on the sprites which I could’ve spent working on the prototype making the game feel unpolished and just lacking on its game play with stiff player movement and lackluster enemy behavior. To our credit, I think we did something right though by listing which sprites are the most important and unique to the game so free assets are reserved for the minor stuff. That at least gave the game some identity I suppose but I guess it also doesn’t matter if the game’s identity is a buggy mess.

2. Not clarifying what our assignments are

Since it’s a game jam, I’ll just treat it loosely and casually. I mean It ain’t exactly a job or some homework so I’ll just tell my team the concept for our game and just let them develop what they want since they are my good friends and then never follow up on what they’re doing until the next day where it turns out that what they’re doing is the same thing I did.
Assign proper tasks to your team members, decide clearly what they should be working on, make sure to have it in some sort of a list or have it written somewhere your team can see. Because we were a bit too loose with the rules not only did we waste precious time that we could’ve spent on another feature but we also now have to decide which one to use in order to not have conflict in our repository. And speaking of repositories…

3. Unity Scenes with Git is HELL

Every time we push or pull from the repository, one thing was always inevitable…MERGE CONFLICT. And this is because we were editing the same single scene in Unity, so to work around this I asked my team to backup their local scene then delete and replace it with the scene from the repository but even then somehow that method just doesn’t work. A lot of time was wasted re-creating scenes we already finished especially on the final day cause somehow the scene that was pushed doesn’t run on my Unity. Next time, it’s probably better to work around this by working on different scenes and just merging what we made at the end.

4. Allot a time for building and testing

Make sure to save some time for building the game and testing it on the web. Don’t make it the last thing you do before submitting because it may turn out that the screen size you played your game on in the unity editor is not the same size it will be displayed at in the web and your game will have this oversized text that are cutoff or gone from the screen and you’ll have no choice but to just keep those cause time is running out and who knows how long it’ll take for the next build to compile…

5. Time management

Probably the most difficult thing to handle in a game jam especially if you already have a 9-5 job. Most of the development for the game occurred around 6-10 pm since that’s already after working hours for my team, so we spent more or less around 20 hours on the development as a whole which is not an excuse since there probably have been game jams shorter than that but the point is those are crucial 20 hours which we could’ve managed better. I felt like a lot were wasted not just on working on the assets but overall on these lulls where I’m mindlessly testing the game while questioning my entire existence. These could’ve been avoided with better management so the development doesn’t feel as aimless.

But hey don’t get me wrong, it’s not like the experience was all negative. Despite these mistakes, I still enjoyed the overall experience, since I got to stretch my creative muscles and push my limits as a game dev. It’s pretty cliched to say this but “failure is only a failure if you don’t learn from it” so hopefully in the next game jams I’m joining, I don’t end up creating “5 more mistakes I committed on a Game Jam” but instead learn from these ones and avoid them.