Table of Contents
I’m proud to say that this year I set a personal best for game jam participation! I made a game for 5 game jams so far this calendar year: Delivery Man for LD 53, Surfer’s Up for the Hard Core Punk Jam, Vapoured Waves for the Winnipeg Game Jam, Shooting Star Saga for GB Jam 11, and You Wouldn’t Download A Car for LD 54. That’s a lot of jamming for a single year!
As much as I love game jams, they can be exhausting. I give up a weekend which could be spent relaxing, and instead decide to crunch to get a game completed. I spend all my waking hours coding (which I also do love) and I often sacrifice sleep and my physical well being. It takes a toll. As fun as they are, I usually don’t exactly feel “rested” and “refreshed” after a jam deadline hits and project is finally submitted. Following the last jam I participated in, I decided it would be a good idea to take a break from jamming for the rest of the year. Give myself some time to rest and recuperate. But then another opportunity presented itself, and I just couldn’t resist the temptation to get involved.
For the month of November, the Winnipeg Game Jam community is hosting a Slow Jam. Whereas the typical game jam runs over the course of 48-72 hours, a slow jam takes place over a much longer duration (in this case a full month). The longer duration is intended to make the jam less stressful. There’s no ranking or competitive aspect. The idea is to encourage people to just make progress on a project. I keep wanting to get more involved with the local community, and since I’m always working on side projects anyways, I decided there was no way I couldn’t get involved in this one. And since I’m not under such a time crunch on this jam, I also don’t have any excuse to not to do a better job documenting the whole process.
Day One
As the first day of the slow jam arrives, I’m still undecided as to what exactly I’m going to do. I see a handful of potential paths I could travel down.
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- I could always work on one of my many existing projects. I could polish and expand one of my game jam projects. Or try to finally complete one of the many started and then abandoned projects that clutter up my github.
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- I could make an NES game using NESMaker. It’s something that’s always been on my bucket list and checking that off would be a great way to end the year.
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- I’ve been wanting to get more practice and practical experience with C++, so I could make something using that language.
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- Lately I’ve also been thinking a lot about tooling, and nothing says that I have to work on a game for the jam. It might be fun to make some kind of tool for making games.
Honestly all of those seem like valid options to me right now. I can see some advantages in all of them and there’s not one that appeals to me all more than the other ones. They’re also not all mutually exclusive. After all the recent issues with Unity, part of me wants to steer clear of that engine for this jam. Adhering to that self-imposed restriction would likely rule out working on one of my existing projects. But right now I’m still leaving the door open so nothing is off the table yet.
Over the past two days, I’ve had two things happen that are kind of vibrating in the background and influencing my direction. My wife isn’t a fan of scary movies, but she (reluctantly) allows me to subject her to one scary movie at Halloween. This year the film I picked was Shivers, David Cronenberg’s 1975 film about the horrors of science gone awry. It’s not the best movie ever made, but I like it. Being a child of the early 80’s, I think images from around that era resonate in my subconscious. It made me want to make a game that uses the aesthetics from the late 70’s/early 80’s that trigger great waves of nostalgia in me.
Then today, I was reminded of a local band that I hadn’t thought of in a while called Yes We Mystic. I decided to look them up and see if they had any upcoming shows planned. I was disappointed to find out that they were no longer a band, having broken up a year ago. I consoled myself by diving into their discography. I find their music so powerful and moving. It made me want to create a game that would evoke the same kinds of emotions.
So here I am at the end of day one of the jam. I have no clear path forward yet. I have an aesthetic and a vague emotional tone I want to try to generate. I have an empty Trello board, and a rough draft of a blog post. So much left to do. But at least this time, I have a whole month to do it.
Day Two
Today I’m still searching for a solid idea. Building off the aesthetic and emotions that were interesting me yesterday, I decide to make a mood board. The hope is that collecting together some images will help solidify those vague elements, and maybe spark some inspiration.
As I’m collecting images of shopping malls and architecture from the early 80’s, I start thinking about the L’Atelier national du Manitoba, a film making collective that were contemporaries of mine back in the early 2000’s. They had a fascination with the history, culture, and media of Winnipeg. They created found footage films using clips of old local cable access shows, commercials, and other bits of the old media of the city.
I really like how they took the local culture of my hometown and elevated and mythologized it. Their work was steeped in Winnipeg, unmistakably a representation of this isolated, desolate winter wasteland that I call home. Maybe this is a path I could follow with this project? Create a video game that follows in the footsteps of their artistic manifesto. I start filling my mood board with images of Winnipeg.
One of L’Atelier’s projects was an urban postering campaign where they plastered posters of the screen printed heads of local celebrities with relevant slogans underneath them. An image of Burton Cummings with ‘Stand Tall’ became an unofficial poster for local civic pride. I started to do some research into famous Winnipeggers to find some of my own local history to mine for nostalgia, and I ended up coming across the fascinating stories of two ex-Winnipeggers that I had never heard of before.
The first was Chris McKinstry, an artificial intelligence researcher who struggled with bipolar disorder. Some of the highlights from his colorful history include: a 7 1/2 hour armed standoff with Toronto police in 1990, starting an online soap opera and then bailing on his debts and not paying the people hired to build the production, and starting Mindpixel, an web-based collaborative artificial project which was designed to create a knowledgebase of millions of human validated probabilistic propositions. Tragically Chris succumbed to his struggles with mental health and took his own life in 2006.
The second interesting history I uncovered was the story of Louis Slotin, a physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project. A young prodigy who entered University at 16, Slotin was involved in early nuclear research including helping to build the first cyclotron in the midwestern United States. His contributions to radiobiology gained him attention from the US government, and they invited him to join the Manhattan project. Slotin was killed while working on the project in Los Alamos, when he accidently began a fission reaction which released a fatal burst of hard radiation.
I’m not sure if either story will end up making it into the game, but both stories fascinated me. Discovering them is encouraging me to dig deeper into local history to try to find fertile ground for the game.
Day Three
Today I finally hit upon an idea that I want to pursue. I want to make a science fiction/cyberpunk version of Winnipeg. Take all the tropes and conventions of a futuristic city, but filter it through the lens of Winnipeg. It’ll be Blade Runner with more toques. Akira with snow tires. Cyberpunk 2077 with Slurpees.
I really like this idea for a couple of reasons. First of all, it feels original. There’s many artists who have used Winnipeg as context for their work, and there’s lots of work in the cyberpunk genre, but I don’t know of anyone who’s combined the two. It feels like a novel way of looking at Winnipeg. This will also give me freedom to include a variety of interesting moments from across Winnipeg’s history by adapting and combining them against the futuristic backdrop. The prospects of what I can do with this setting really excites me.
This idea hasn’t answered all of my open questions about the project. It hasn’t narrowed down exactly what the game is going to be, or point me towards a genre. The first idea that comes to me is some sort of card battling game. The future economy runs on Cryptomon, cute digital monsters that also function as currency. In the game you’d play as a hacker caught between powerful forces as you try to unravel some huge conspiracy within the city. The overworld of the game would be a point and click style interface, with Cryptomon fights playing out in a trading card battle game.
I like the basic plot of you playing as a hacker caught between powerful forces. It’s not a very original, but I feel like it gives me a lot of freedom to add a bunch of colorful characters for the powerful forces that you’re caught between. I also like the idea of Cryptomon; hybrids of digital currency and digital monsters. I haven’t fully thought through all the details on how that is exactly supposed to work as a functional currency, but something about the core of that idea is interesting.
The biggest challenge for this idea is that fact that I haven’t created a card battling game before. Coming up with some original game mechanics that aren’t just a derivative copy of something that already exists with a new theme slapped on top of it will be hard. And balancing a card game would be another challenge that I haven’t dealt with before.
In the coming days, I’ll try to narrow down and refine my game idea. I’m not fully committed to the Cryptomon Hacker game, so there’s a good chance that the core idea of the game may change. The next few days will be all about brainstorming about Neo-Winnipeg. Hopefully something in those brainstorms will help guide me as to what kind of game would be ideal to put in that setting. In conjunction with that, I’ll start working on narrowing down a tech stack for the game. The type of game I want to make will have an influence on the tools I want to use to make it, but I can at least start by doing a survey of the tools I have available to me.
Day Four & Five
The weekend arrives and I decide to take a bit of a break from working on the project. My heart just isn’t feeling like doing the work, and I decide not to force myself to power through my apathy. Instead I decide to take some time to relax and enjoy the weekend. For my birthday, my beautiful wife bought me a copy of Super Mario Wonder, and I spend the majority of my time on the weekend playing through the game.
The side scrolling Mario games have always been some of my favorites. Super Mario Bros. 3 still is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve been enjoying the modern side scroller Mario games that started with New Super Mario Bros., and Wonder continues in that tradition. There’s lots of little nods to the old side scroller Mario games which I love. From the enemies, to the level designs, things feel new and yet also familiar and nostalgic. There art is great, and the music is excellent. It’s the kind of solid game I’ve come to expect from Nintendo.
The gameplay has that good platforming feel that you expect from Mario games, and the levels are well designed. The difficulty level is a little lower than I’d like. I powered through most of the game without any difficulty, and I sometimes wish there was a bit more of a challenge. But I also completely understand that these games are targeted for all ages, and not just people like me who have been playing Mario games for decades. The difficulty level feels like it’s well balanced, and there are a handful of special levels that do provide the greater challenge that I’m looking for.
The game is such a solid piece of work, that I now want to make a side scrolling platformer. I’m not sure if that game genre is a perfect fit for the theme I want to work with, but the pure joy of platforming is intoxicating. Part of the appeal of making a platformer is also the fact that I feel comfortable with that genre. Most of the games I’ve made are platformers. I’ve have experience building and balancing platformers, and I’m confident I would come out of the jam with a well playing game.
Of course that comfort means that I wouldn’t be growing as much as if I challenged myself to tackle something completely new like building a card game. I’m torn on whether that’s a good or a bad thing. Obviously I want to grow and develop, but I also wanted this to be a less stressful jam. Maybe taking the easier road is the better option in this case.
One final thing related to the game happens this weekend. I visit my mom on the weekends, and of course I’m looking forward to telling her all about the Neo-Winnipeg idea I’ve had that I’m so excited about. But when I give her the elevator pitch of the idea, instead of excitement, it’s met with apathy and disinterest. She’s not familiar with some of my references, and doesn’t really get the concept. When you share an idea you’re excited about with someone, and it’s met with indifference, it really throws a wet blanket over the whole thing. But instead of getting upset about it, or being disappointed in the idea, I see that the issue has to do with how I’m communicating the idea. I need to work on refining the idea, find the interesting core that people can connect with, and practice pitching the idea. The idea is solid and once I can verbalize it properly, I’m sure my excitement about it will be contagious.
Day Six & Seven
To start the week, I have a couple of busy evenings full of non-game related matters. The DnD group that I Dungeon Master finally has an opportunity to meet up again after a few months of not being able to get together, so I spent my Monday night adventuring in Waterdeep. Tuesday night I spent at a Moneen concert, which was amazing. No progress is made on the game either night.
As the first week of the jam draws to a close, I’m not as far along as I’d like to be. I’ve lost a bit of momentum on the project over the last four days. I still don’t have a solid idea of what actual game I’m planning to make, or how I’m going to make it. I’ve found the setting I want to use for the game which I feel is very strong and gives me lots of opportunities to do some really interesting and original things.
As the second week begins, I need to nail down my plan and start to aggressively schedule the rest of the jam. I need to start building the game. If I can get an MVP complete by the end of this second week, I’ll be back on schedule and in good shape. Falling short of that will put me at risk of not getting something completed, or having to crunch to get things finished. I do not want to turn this jam into an exercise in stress. The whole point of getting involved was because it was going to be a chill, lower stress jam experience. If it’s looking like I’m getting myself into a situation where I need to crunch to get things done, I might just have to step away and give up on the jam entirely. This will be a real make or break week for the project.
