AKA First experience with working on a game with a team.

I went to my first game jam back in November the weekend of the 3rd. I had no idea what to expect for it, other then making a game of course. Just went knowing that I had to start somehow.

When the theme was announced, “What is reality?”. I got overwhelmed and started thinking way too complicated and had no idea what to do. The friend of mine that I had come to work together with did manage to come up with an idea.

So, unsure of what to do I hopped on his band wagon along with two other programmers and 4 other artists and started drafting up the game and what everyone is going to do. It was pretty promising.

As we started working, this was already 11 at night? And I can’t function well without sleep so I headed home for the night.

This is where things go downhill. A day or so before my friend had gotten a ear infection and was causing him pain. So now imagine you go in that morning, slightly late because you forgot to set an alarm, and the project lead is not there.

You don’t know what to do. Or more specifically you dont know the exact details of what to do. So I chugged away on the controller for the Truck for what I thought it was supposed to be.

Hours pass and not much progress was made. But, our sound developer and the programmer he was working with made some fantastic progress on this radio that was to be in the truck.

My friend the project lead did end up coming back that day after feeling better and all the work I did was scrapped, fair enough the new solution was simpler and it was not hard to make.

At this point we had the truck on a road and a VR steering wheel and we where deciding on what exactly we needed to work on. This part for me is a bit hazy. Basically a person that was not the project lead was bringing into question the game’s design, which is fine but wanting to make it more complicated then it needed to be for a game jam was the problem. I got overwhelmed with the talks between that man and the project lead and had to walk away, same with one of the artists who brought up the that the game we where making was not Fun and not Fun to make.

Which to be fair there was not much of a game and it was already over 24 hours into the 48 hour game jam. And the VR components and the truck controller had not been combined yet. We did not even had core gameplay grey boxed. We where waiting on assets.

When everything felt it was going to fall apart, my friend and the project manager came over and told us what we needed to do. Thats it. That was all that we needed. All we all needed was someone to tell us what to make and the rest of the jam went smoothly. Well as smoothly as it could when we had so much we wanted to put in and from our very basic understanding of how to work in a group in the Unity Editor. DO EVERYTHING IN YOUR OWN SCENES. PREFAB ALL THE THINGS.

We had to cut out a bunch of things that we wanted to include, of course, but by the end we had a game. A game where you grab onto a steering wheel and dodged weird looking Ice Cream trucks, ducks, and aliens.

Even though we did not make an amazing game, we all learned a hell of a lot about working in a group.

  • Without a direction the project is not going anywhere
  • Start simple and stay simple
  • With Unity prefab all the things and dont touch anyone else’s stuff
  • With large groups, more time will be spend on communication then the actual game dev
  • If you can, have people you know you can work with if you do a game jam or not and learn how to work with randoms

Oh yeah one of the judges actually liked our mattress fire and that raised the morale of the whole group. It was a weird experience but I am glad its over. We made a thing and learned a lot.

I’ve likely forgot to mention some things, But thank you for reading this. Until next time.

-Randall Hines