Before the event - Preparing and recruiting

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Bringing together the right mix of people, with the correct mood

1. Know your Jam - and make it known
2. Recruitment - gather the right mix of people to create magic
3. Community - Be faithful to your community, and empower them
4. The organisation team

Know your Jam - and make it known

For recruitment and creating partnership, is useful to have a clear identity and the tools to make it known.

In our case, we want to organise a convivial event, where anyone dreaming of creating a game can join, and achieve something they will be proud of. As most don’t know what a Game Jam is, here is the most basic description we came up with:

Create a game in 48 hours
Alone or in a team
Beginner or experienced
Video Game or Board Game
Developper, Musician, Designer, Author, or just Player…

We have a logo and a name, so we can be recognised. And we have a web page with previous game jams, so it is easy to explain what our event is about.

And of course, when the game Jam arrive, we have a an easy online tool to let participants register.

Recruitment - gather the right mix of people to create magic

The success of a Jam heavily relies on gathering the right mix of participants. Our choice is to favor team creation between people who don’t know each other, and to mix differents skills and beginners with more experienced people.

Mixing people and skills: make your participants achieve the impossible 

Why is it so important to mix people and skills? Because our fun is to see the participants create something they thought was beyond their scope.

Also, as a game jam participant, it is absolutely magic to see your production transcended by someone else’s skill:

• as a developper, it is incredible to see you code come to life with nice graphics,
• as a musicians, it is crazy to see your song turn into an atmosphere in an living environment
• an so p,…

Allowing these team creations, might be the most important thing we bring to our participants.

Uniting different people: promoting in different environments

Even if you if your event is famous, recruitment always requires some amount of work. The wider participant’s diversity you seek, the more of channels you use, because they have differents lives and tastes.

Here is what we are doing:

• Communication in our existing community: Newsletter, discord, twitter, facebook, word of mouth… In our case, we have too communities: Hitbox Makers, those who took part of previous Game Jams. And PALO ALTOURS, our association which connects most companies and people in our town dealing with computing or startups.
  
  
• Local schools: We are lucky enough to have developper’s and visual design schools in our town. And events like Game Jams are extremely interesting for them... So they are natural partners. In the first years, we met most directors and teachers, as well as their students associations. Now that these relations have been installed, they still need to be maintained, but it is quicker.
  
  
• Local gaming associations and companies: such as board game, roleplaying or retro-gaming associations, webTVs, escape games and game stores...
  
  
• Press release in local newspaper and referencing in local agendas: for example, there are 2 radio and 1 TV show dealing with computing and geek stuff in our town. We are prime material for them.
  
  
• Press release in national specialised press: Our event is pretty modest, however every year, our press release has been published in some national specialised media.
  
  
• Communication in indie game creation communities (national or international)

Well, that’s a long list! But for our first editions, we could track that each action had brought us from 3 to 5 participants. And we had a rich mix of participants, with 70% of them from our town, and 30% from somewhere else. And it led to incredible encounters!

Now that we are installed, it is easier to meet our target of 70 participants, but we are at risk to grow a more uniform audience.

Ludum Dare and Global Game Jam: There is a huge advantage in taking part in this events: they reference Real World Gatherings, and the are famous enough to attract some participants for you (probably not a crowd though…). However, specifically with the Ludum Dare, there is a risk with recruiting people who have no idea what it is: most won’t care entering its online process (publishing the games online, voting for other games after the jam…) The Global Game Jam is perfectly suited for that though…

Competitive and Tech Based Jams: The recruitment strategy will be much more focused on a specific group of people. You might not want beginners nor casual participants...
Competitive Jam: If you are into competition, make it professional: you will need a high level jury, good partners, a powerful communication, and a dedicated team to animate and capture the event.

Tech Based Jam: If your participant are technically good, it might be a great idea to invite some experts who will guide them with the technologies you want to experiment. However beware! If they are not so good, you might trap them into something too complicated for them... A Tech-based Jam is not for everyone.

Community - Be faithful to your community, and empower them

One of the greatest capital of a recurring event is its community: those who took part or helped us in previously.

They will be the first to promote, support or attend to you event. And it is also among them that you might recruit your next organisation team. So your community is incredibly important and deserves to be treated well.

Some hints:

• They deserve to be informed. Find a way to let them know early enough when is your next event. But be careful: not everyone wants to be added to a newsletter ;-) Ask them first.
  
  
• They are free. Everyone here is doing this for fun. But we all have our lives, jobs and families. Some might have been be your best participants or part of core the organisation team for years, and suddenly move on... That’s life! Don’t worry: new wonderful people will be joining you. And someone who went under the radar, might have discretely become one of your best recruiting agent ;-)
  
  
• Empower your community, but don’t stress them Our participants are incredibly skilled, and some want to share. So they might really appreciate that propose them -personally- to take part to the organisation. However remember that everyone is free to say no, or move on. If you bring new people in the team, it also means that you are open to their ideas and suggestions. It is crucial, because if you want to last, you need to renew your organisation team. For example, since the beginning of the year we are organising monthly workshops (pixel art, discovery of a development tool, sound design...), and most presentation are done by previous participants or people they know. It is a great way to tighten the community and make the Game Jam fun last longer. However, we’d advise to keep it simple, and know where your core activity is: last year, we went into the organisation of a crazy exhibition for a geek event, with 20,000 visitors. The experience was incredible, and the result unique! But we literally burnt our organisation team, and lost some of them. It took some time to recover...
  
  
• Are workshops required a good thing to prepare for the Jam? Not so sure... In the early years, we thought that workshops before the Jam were crucial for the recruitment and it success, specially for beginners. But with more experience, we don’t believe this anymore: most beginners won’t come before the jam ; and the others would have done something great anyway. Workshops are great, but more as a long term animation to tighten your community.

The organisation team

Organising a good event requires a great team, which is enjoying what is is doing. But beware: depending on your ambitions, it might require a fair amount of work!

From the preparation to the jam: an evolving team

The requirements before, during and after the Jam are very different. And you won’t attract the same people to give you a hand at each phase.

Before the event: the core team.

If you go for a medium sized Jam with a low budget, you might not need that many people at this stage. But it is a long term work, which can at times be tedious:

• planning the event early enough,
• preparing and executing the communication,
• planning the logistics,
• preparing the animation,
• planning the budget and finding the potential partners.

It might be a good idea to 6 month prior the event, which an increase in workload 3 month before. In our case, we were 3 with a general project overview, with 3 other people involved in specific tasks (finding the place, building communication assets, and prepare some -really cool- animation for saturday evening).

Being at least 3 is great, because we can share and adjust our ideas.

During the event: the extended team + some extra help

During the event, you are likely to require an extended team to handle your events highlights and organise a rotation. But if you warn people early enough it might not be that difficult to recruit: some find it very exciting.

Here are a few hints to shape the extended team:

• Night shifts and rotations: the place will likely be opened at any time of the day and night. But the participants need you to be fresh and relaxed, so make sure that your team is big are enough to organise night shifts.
  • For a tiny event, a team of 2 really is a sad and tiring minimum, 3 is slightly better.
  • At 6 people, it is getting much more comfortable. You will be able to set 3 teams of 2, which will fully be in charge 8 hours per day.
• Logistics Highlights: There will be at least 2 logistic highlights which will require some help during the event:
  • the installation,
  • the final clean-up after the event is finished.
  • And many more if you provide food.
• Animations Highlights: There will be at least 2 animations highlights:
  • when you welcome participants,
  • and at the event conclusion.
  • We organize and extra animation highlight on saturday evening.
• If you are in charge, don’t try to make a game. If want to make a game, don’t be in charge. Trust us: creating a game and being in charge don’t mix well. There will always be someone in need of help, a table to clean, missing toilet paper, coffee to make... You won’t be able to focus, and might get grumpy whenever someone comes with a request.

And remember: allow yourself to rest, go for a sound sleep, and out for a walk. If the rotations have been well organised, the world won’t collapse when you are away. ;-)

Usually, many participants are thrilled to come a but earlier to give a hand for the installation.

However, everyone will be absolutely smashed at for the final clean-up. So plan ahead, and warn your participants early enough that you will need some help once everything is done: “The more, the quicker, the better” If you plan to provide food, you will also need enough helping hands for the preparation, serving AND cleaning. If you provide food for every meal, you can’t rely on the participants. You really need a catering team.

These events can easily get be pretty hectic, with speeches to give, tons of questions and request, things to move, decisions to make, food to handle… It really is a good idea to plan ahead who will do what. Basically, one person can only handle 1 or 2 missions at a time.

After the event: the -smashed- core team

The event was great! You community has developed! But you fell smashed…

However, you really need to nail the event’s success. And there are a few things to do the day after: finishing the clean up, making sure that every games are published in nice page, posting to articles, keeping in touch with your newly grown community…

So plan these actions ahead, (and not too many). Also, everyone should be advised to take at least one day off.

Composition of the dream organisation team

There are different moments in the organisation: the slow preparation work, the ectic animation during the event, the tedious accounting after the Jam… And different activities to do: partnership management, communication, animation, accounting. So a great team is made of different kind of people:

• Casual / Involved: Not everybody wants, of can afford, to be extremely involved in the organisation. So attribute the roles wisely, pay attention to each other and adjust your ambitions: it is alway better to do less, than doing it wrong or put to much pressure on someone who can’t do it.
  
  
• Serious / Fun (or task focused / relation focused people): Being serious and meticulous is great to plan ahead and to make sure that everything will run smoothly. However, and event which is just “smooth” is boring... So it is a really good idea to bring in the team some people who might not seem as involved during the preparation, but who will create a great atmosphere during the event.
  
  
• other skills…: of course, there is a large variety of skills that you will need. Communication, public relations… It depends on your project and ambition.

Bounding and renewing the team

Whatever their implication is, the entire team needs to bound together and feel recognized for the time and energy they gave. So it is good to building the project together, and have a good beer or a diner, before and after the event.

Also, it is nice to let the community know that you are open to new ideas, and need some help. But broadcasting a message to an anonymous crowd might not be enough: Some people would love to help, but have never considered that possibility or believe that they don’t have the legitimacy. So it might be a great idea to personally propose them to give you a hand. As long as they know that they can decline, they might feel a great pride and maybe become your next core organisation team!

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