HeldenTUM Summer Game Jam

We welcome you to the first internal Summer Game Jam! The goal is to get you back into Unity, working on a project together, to deliver a game after 48 hours, that is playable and finished as much as possible.

The theme is Self Destruct.

Procedure

At the start of the jam, we'll announce a theme that your game will have to incorporate somehow. From that point on, you'll have 48 hours to work on your game. At all times during the jam, the organizers and jury of the jam can be hit up to help with technical difficulties, general questions or finding ideas.

Working period

• Concepting
• Prototyping & refining the design
• Implementation
• Polishing
• Testing
• Lots of bug fixing
• Exporting and uploading
• Setting up your itch.io page (with description, screenshots, trailer, etc.)

Concepting

It is very easy to think too big. Limit yourself to a project frame that fits within the 48 hours depending on your team size and your skillset. Try to come up with multiple ideas that seem fun, interesting and make your game stand out from the rest. Choose the one that you feel most comfortable with within your team. If your team fails at coming up with something, feel free to consult the jam organizers to give you some input, or take a "trivial" approach.

Prototyping & refining the design

Try to picture your idea as a complete game and make a list of everything you'll need and how it should look like in the end. Ask yourself: Is that list feasible? If not, can anything be removed without killing the game? Are any parts of the game cycle not enjoyable? Can those be changed to be more fun?

Implementation

After you got your idea worked out, you should start with the most important things first: the actual game. Try to work in parallel and independently to avoid merge conflicts in your repository, then fuse it all together. Most of the time, a game needs more than just the main game loop to be excellent.

Polish

A well presented menu, a tutorial, game information via the user interface, etc. can really improve the quality of a game. While not everything is necessary or doable in 48 hours, try to make your game clear and understandable to the player, or better, to someone who never used a PC before.

Testing

Playtesting is fun, because it is the first feedback you'll get about your game. Of course you can also playtest yourself, but developer bias will make you overlook problems a new player might run into. Try to get people from outside your team to play your game.

Endless bug fixing

Creating a game in 48 hours is tough and there won't be time for perfect implementations of everything. Most likely, your project will be a very instable pile of scripts that loosely stick together and hopefully does what it's supposed to do. To ensure that for as many cases as possible, hunt down the bugs in your game and kill them without killing your game.

Exporting and uploading

When uploading you can choose from a downloadable standalone or embed it in the browser as a webGL/html5 file. You will also be asked a few questions in the upload dialog to make the voting for others easier.

Setting up your itch.io page

Itch.io makes it really easy to upload games to your site and creates a seperate game page for all of your games. It's the first thing people will see about your game and also will judge it by. Only 1 person needs to upload it and the rest of the team can be listed as contributors in the game page's settings. Screenshots, neat colors or a banner, or even a trailer can make your page special.

Voting period

After the deadline, you'll get to play everybody else's games via itch.io and you can vote for all of them in 5 categories:

• Design/Gameplay - Are the game mechanics creative and unique? Is the game actually fun to play?
• Polish - Is the game finished and well rounded? Was everything clear and understandable? Is the game free of bugs?
• Presentation - Does the game look and sound appealing?
• Technical - Does the game implement something technically advanced? (e. g. level generation, advanced physics, etc.?)
• Theme - Was the theme implemented well?

Attendee voting

Each of these categories will have a winner (one game can win multiple categories) all of you get to choose with your votes. 

Jury voting

The jury consisting of The Fifth King (Marcell), SpyPlayer (Marvin) and Weifan (Stefan) will also play every game and interview the team about the making of it. Then, they'll judge the games and nominate their chosen winners in the same 5 categories as above.

After the jam

Your game will remain on your itch.io page and the public will be able to see what you have created. Player analytics on the page show you how popular your game gets over time and we hope to entice you to do more game development in your spare time in the future, participate in other game jams and show your ideas on the discord server.

Terms of conduct

The HeldenTUM Summer Game Jam is an unofficial event for educational purposes. For that reason, only game students of first semester 2021/22 are allowed. Should there for any reason be conflict or disrespectfulness between the people involved in the jam, or inappropriate content within the games, the jury will reserve the right to disqualify.