Before you read, there are spoilers ahead.
This last weekend I participated in the Game Maker’s Toolkit Game Jam. My game, “A Forest Full of Monsters” pushed me outside my comfort zone of systems and mechanics and focused more on art and overall experience. I am very happy with how it turned out.
If you haven’t heard about it, Game Maker’s Toolkit is an excellent YouTube Channel that produces video essays on game design. Every year, its creator, Mark Brown, runs a Game Jam to explore new, innovative ideas. This year was no exception.
The theme, “Genre without a Mechanic”, required you to innovate. You had to pick a genre and remove a core mechanic from that genre. The theme required you to think out of the box by its very nature.
One of the things that went wrong with the game was knowledge on how I approached the genre ruined a twist in the game so if you plan on playing it but haven’t gotten to it yet, play it now before continuing. Spoiler warning I guess? Here’s another link to the game for your convenience:
My game “A Forest Full of Monsters” is an RPG without any monsters to fight. Being more focused on experience and message and less on mechanics, the game is a little more high concept than the theme pushes for. But, I liked the idea and the execution. Hopefully Mark Brown forgives me.
Without further ado, here’s the what went right and what went wrong:
What Went Right
Setting Expectations and Focus
Once I had the idea in place, I knew what I wanted out of my time in the game jam. I knew I wanted to focus on the overall experience with an emphasis on flow and visuals. With that in mind, I pulled in the scope and put in more time for art and animation pipelines. As a result, the art has a decent level of polish for a game jam game (for me at least) and I got plenty of art practice in.
For future projects, particularly game jams, I would recommend setting expectations accordingly before hand. It felt like I was practicing, not just scrambling to make a game. It seems obvious, but in the face of a weekend full of so many different tasks and responsibilities, honing in can have big pay offs.
Art Style
Though my art skills are on the weak side, I was happy with how the art style turned out for my game. Going in, I knew I wanted something simple that I can actually make while still having it be consistent and appealing. Inspired by the art of Minit , I wanted to focus on process and shape and not get caught up in color palettes and shading.
Additionally, the parallax scrolling backgrounds were a nice way to allow my coding to help give the game a nice boost in aesthetics. I didn’t want the background to be too detailed to take away from the simple character design so I went with layered single colored shapes.
Coding for Speed vs Coding for Stability
In the project, I found a nice balance between coding for speed vs coding for stability. I had enough foresight to know when to create a stable, scalable system and when I could just hack something together.
With the dialog pop ups, I knew I wanted the game to run on a state machine so I didn’t have to worry about edge cases with player input while in the dialog system. I took the time to throw together a somewhat competent state machine. Most of the code for the game ran in the state machine. When I wanted to add the menu transitions, all I had to do was add new states. The time was well worth the payoff.
The dialog/interactable system was another example where I put in a little more work up front for payoffs layer on. I had the messages run off of scriptable objects so I could easily manage and update them inside the editor instead of on prefabs. I maintained the interactable script throughout the weekend allowing me to easily build upon them when needed such as when creating the two state interaction of chests.
The dialog/interaction system was the bulk of the game so keeping it stable, easy to use, and versatile was a win.
What Went Wrong
Art Workflow
The part of development that slowed me down the most was my art workflow. I am rusty with creating my own art assets, animating them, and bringing them into Unity. I also wish I knew better tools other than photoshop for making pixel art, particularly animating pixel art.
I didn’t want to choose an art style before hearing the theme, but in the future, some prep to facilitate the most likely scenario of pixel art could go along way. I’ll definitely sort out my software before the next game jam.
Never Enough Time for Audio
I did manage to get music in, but the rest of the audio space for the game is empty. Though I have experience with creating and implementing SFX, I was not prepared to create some from scratch. I know there’s some nice 8-bit era sfx tools, but I didn’t have time to learn how to use them in the last few hours of the game jam.
Similar to my art workflow, some prep for a default scenario could help get some competent audio into my next game.
Not Fully Utilizing the Theme
I love the theme. I think it pushes the developers to think outside the box. It is both open ended and focused in a way that it allows for vastly different paths to go down. I also think it has enough legs to be reused in the future, perhaps focusing on specific genres.
The theme is inherently mechanic focused. Being a systems designer, I tend to focus more on mechanics. However, when I had the idea, I wanted to stretch myself out of my comfort zone. I felt like it paid off, but I would love to give the theme another crack. Maybe someday I’ll do a personal game jam with the theme.
But ultimately, my game is on the outer stretches of the theme and doesn’t quite fall into the spirit of it. I wouldn’t make my game any different, but I do recognize that it isn’t quite in the spirit of the theme. But that’s what game jams are for: to practice, to stretch yourself, and to be inspired. So in my book, the game jam was a success!
Big thanks to Game Maker’s Toolkit for an excellent game jam.
I recommend playing the other game jam games. With a rad theme, there are tons of rad games!
I’m starting to get into these game jams. I already can’t wait for the next one!
