GMTK2021 Post-jam thoughts

Originally posted at GMTK 2021 postjam thoughts – IslandWind (wordpress.com).

I had a lot of fun participating in the GMTK 2021 game jam, and I wanted to write down my thoughts on the experience, now that I’ve had some time to think and reflect. Writing this without the ‘tone’ of it feeling really pretentious was surprisingly difficult, but as the kids these days say, just deal.

So this year I finally joined the annual game jam hosted by the Game Maker’s Toolkit YouTube channel. I’ve seen the jams be hosted for about five years, but never worked up the nerve to actually sign up.

For those who don’t know, a game jam is an event where participants are given a theme, which this year was ‘joined together’, and are then given one or more days to make a game from scratch revolving around that theme. Given the short time before the deadline, game jams tend to value creativity and new mechanics over polish or game length.

I went into GMTK 2021 with no prior game jam experience, not too many projects submitted online before, and no goals other than to take part, make a game, and upload it before the 48 hours were out. I knew setting out that my project might get one star, or five stars, the latter being way more unlikely; it might get lots of attention or be completely overlooked, and that I might be pleased or not at all happy with the results.

This particular game jam gave us 48 hours to make the game, and after committing myself mentally I got out an A3 sheet of paper and a pen and started drawing up a mind map. I got some vague ideas about friendship, or maybe a story about a school class, and then I spent the rest of the day doing other things, including a night-time hike, while I turned the ideas over in my mind, so to say.

Eventually I decided on an idea for a Lost Vikings-esque Calvin and Hobbes platform game I have had in my head for a while. You’d control Calvin and Hobbes, switching between them at will, and you’d have to solve puzzles and challenges built around their different abilities. Hobbes would be the big, strong, and fast character, able to leap over obstacles and deal with enemies, but would turn into a plush when seen by humans. Calvin, on the other hand, would be small enough to fit through tight spaces, and would also be able to carry plushie Hobbes out of harm’s way so that he could turn back into a tiger.

The first issue was that I had no art Calvin and Hobbes art assets, so I had to make do with whatever came with the game making program I was using, the humble RPG Maker, which also, by the way, ruled out the platform game as a genre and made me go for a top-down 2D JRPG-style game instead, like the old Final Fantasy titles. The game had a wolf character, and a bear plush, and so the game became about a boy called Alvin who owned a bear blush, Bobbes, who turned into a wolf when alone with Alvin. I was slightly nervous that players wouldn’t like having the bear plush turn into a different kind of animal, so I lampshaded this in an early-game conversation ;) . I next needed monsters, so I found a suitable monster sprite and decided to call them ‘hurrofs’, a word I just made up out of thin air, but which I really liked, partly because it sounds like the kind of noise an large, predatory animal might make. RPG Maker also provides some music, which really helped set the mood for the game.

I then set about making my game. Making the system that let you switch characters was pretty easy, and I seem to recall exprimenting with this in RPG Maker before. What was a bit more tricky was the gameplay itself. Clever puzzles, it turns out, are hard to make, and I only had a day to make my game. This meant I ended up settling on more of a story-driven game, with cute, charming, and witty dialogue revolving around Calving and Hobbes-esque situations, like run-ins with the girl next door or Calvin getting himself in trouble by daydreaming while in real-life conversations with the people around him — and, of course, fights with monsters.

I put a lot of effort into the writing, and also Googled Calvin and Hobbes strips for reminders on what the way they talked, which gave me such gems as “noodleloaf” and “baloney brain”. Alvin, Bobbes, and the Horrible Hurrofs may not have ended up as much of a challenging or deep puzzle game, but at least I got positive feedback for humor and presentation.

In hindsight, I should’ve been a bit less ambitious about the puzzles and let the player just play the game more – given Bobbes some more creeks to jump over and Hurrofs to eat, and Alvin some more logs to crawl through, and let the player find the occassional hidden treasure, and in general made the game less about just walking from encounter to encounter. Another beginner’s mistake I made was that I apparently didn’t do a very good job at telling the player what to do next, or how to interact with the game. Several commenters said they really liked the game, but were confused about where to go next, and unsure if they’d finished the game. Whoops.

I took it as a lesson to do a better job with allowances and dialogue pointing the player the right way (such as “let’s head east to our secret hideout”) next time — all in all, GMTK2021 was a huge learning experience for me.

When I had around two hours left, I had to decide if I should make one or more puzzles or just make an ending and upload it. I had no experience with compressing a game for release or uploading it to the Itch.io server it would be hosted on, so I ended up just finishing up and uploading it to the web. I showed it to my brother, along with a download link so that he could make sure the game could be downloaded and played, which I’m glad I did, as he found a bug I got to fix before the deadline ;) . He sent me a snap of himself playing the game on his laptop, and it was such a weird experience seeing my game on someone else’s screen. I had the same experience when a YouTuber sampled my game, and when I got to sit next to a friend of mine as she played through it on my laptop.

Anyways, once the game had been submitted, all I could do was wait for views, downloads, ratings, and comments — imagine how happy I was when the first two comments were really positive. Then, both since I wanted my own project to get attention, and because a big part of the fun with the game jam was playing other peoples’ games, I set out exploring projects that looked interesting, for then to rate them and leave a comment where I made sure to tell the creator exactly what I liked about each game. This was fun to do and also drew people to my own game — win-win.

Once the deadline had passed we had seven days to enjoy games and submit ratings, with each game given a score of one to five in presentation, fun, and originality. 14 people rated my game, which made the system deduct 15% from each rating (this is to prevent games with few ratings from dominating the score board if, say, four people rated a game and they all happened to rate it a five, whereas a game with 80 ratings would have a much higher chance of having both positive and negative feedback), so next year I’m going to work harder to get people to rate my game.

Either way, when the annual Top 20 showcase video was released and the ratings for each game made public, I went to my page and litterally gasped. Out of 6000+ participants, I ended up in 1719th place in presentation with a raw score (before the 15% cut) of 3.6 of 5, 2015th place in fun, and 2295th place overall. I had noticed that a lot of the games were pretty samey and not that creative, and so I was hoping to place maybe in the mid-3000’s, so I was just floored and ecstatic by how well my humble little game, my first-ever game jam submission, had done.

The only thing that was slightly disappointing was that I ‘only’ got a rating of 3.1 for originality, when I myself felt I had a really clever and original idea – my game was, as far as I could tell, one of very few playing with the idea of two characters with very different abilities (the one I found that came closest to the same core concept was the clever and cozy Trick’s Adventure). Then again, I had based it off Calvin and Hobbes, and it did end up playing a pretty small role gameplay-wise. Also, there’s no way to know how many people fired it up and only played it for a few minutes before moving on to the next game, and thus maybe thought it was just a ‘walking simulator’ without much gameplay. Oh well. Either way I’m happy by how well I did.

My only other regret, I guess, is that since the game jam had 6000+ entries (of whom a couple hundred seem to have taken their games back down), my project did ‘drown’ a bit amidst all the other games. I had known this could happen, of course, especially since GMTK is such a massive game jam, but it did hurt a bit all the same. Another good reason to work harder to promote myself next year, I suppose.

Either way, I’m really glad I finally took the plunge and I’m already looking forward to GMTK 2022, although I think I’ll also sign up for one or two smaller game jams in the meantime. I’ll probably try to learn Unity in the meantime, to give myself some more freedom in what kind of games to make. Unity games can also be played directly from a web browser, meaning players won’t have to take the extra time to download it to their hard drives.

Anyways, since the game jam had so many wonderful submissions, I think my next blog post is going to be a showcase of sorts of other peoples’ games that I greatly enjoyed playing.

In the meantime, Alvin, the Wolf, and the Horrible Hurrofs is available for free on itch.io ;).