A bunch of us who participated in the Global Game Jam earlier this year were asked about our experiences by a writer for a PC games magazine. Here's my answers...
What is your prior experience with game dev?
I've been tinkering with making games since the C64 and Amiga days. When I left Uni I went to live in the UK for a couple of years, and got a job at Lionhead Studios working on Black & White. After returning to Australia I joined Team Bondi to lead their AI team on the ambitious L.A. Noire. After two-and-a-half years there, I returned to Perth as lead programmer at Interzone Games, working on a Football (as in Soccer) MMO.
Most recently, I've started up RocketHands with some mates from Interzone. At RocketHands we're putting gamejam-style rapid development into practice, aiming to create small, polished games in a fraction of the time that larger titles take. But we're taking things slowly; raising capital and setting up a company rather than going into personal debt. We're very lucky to have an awesome, and very well known, company advisor to help point us in the right direction.
What prompted you to participate?
There's a vibrant game dev community in Perth, and I like to think that it's analagous to our music industry; everyone hangs out together and helps each other out creatively. One of the guys over here organised a local gamejam event (http://gamejam.org) that all of the Interzone crowd loved; we'd work all day on our MMO and then go home to work on our personal gamejam entries for four hours a night. The competitive spirit spurred everyone on, and we enjoyed showing off progress in the office the next day.
When we got wind of GGJ it was obvious that we'd all take part. It was the first time we'd teamed up to work together on the one game, though; previous gamejam events had been solo efforts.
What was it like to be there?
It was a blur. Gamejamming basically forces you to be creative. You don't have a safety net; you just need to go in and start working, and you fly by the seat of your pants. It was just a period of intense, concentrated creativity, and the buzz lasted for weeks afterwards. It started pretty slowly, because they wanted to show a video and get everyone in a room to discuss their ideas for games, but we were just itching to get started, so the wait was painful.
Dodgy, another RocketHands member, and I teamed up with Nigel, a pickup on the day, and just sat around a table coding. We had a pretty solid concept, and it was just a matter of making it happen. We were intent on creating a complete game, rather than just a tech demo, and getting stuff like front-end menus, high score tables and even a pause mode hooked up can actually take a massive amount of time; you've got to get them in working at the start, even though they're not the most glamorous aspect of development.
We didn't have any major issues; we made sure to set up off-site hosted source control, using git, so even though we three were sitting around a table working on our lappy's, we were syncing our stuff to and from a server in the States. Everyone handled the time pressure really well, and usual project management techniques went out the window. It was a case of "you do this, I'll do that" and no time for arguing. And we had the Simons (Wittber and Boxer) come in at the end to supply music and graphics respectively. So quite a team effort.
What effect does the tight schedule have on the game itself?
Massive, massive advantages. That's why seven of us decided to start up an indie studio with gamejamming as a core part of the development process. You basically don't have the luxury of time, so there's no faffing about thinking about how great the game's going to be; you just have to get in there, roll up your sleeves and make it work. And if it doesn't work, you try something else until you wind up with something that does work. Putting severe constraints on what you're doing forces you to be creative; we had a massive time constraint plus the various gamejam themes to adhere to, so there's little wiggle room, but you still want to do something that stands out from the crowd.
You've got a limited amount of time to get your shit together and release a game that's fun, and you're constantly chopping and changing to hit that target. In traditional game dev, people are often reluctant to change the core components of the game design, so studios are always going over their time budget. When you're gamejamming, you don't have a choice. A downside is the risk that the game you end up with will be crap, but coming up with a crap game in 48 hours is so much better than plodding along for five years, and you come out of it with knowledge that you can apply to your next effort. So it's a big win in my opinion, and we're hoping to prove that those techniques can be used succesfully in a commercial environment.