Postmortem

Friday the 31st of January 2020, I was on site in for the Global Game Jam at Groningen, Holland. I had previously made contact with 4 other jammers that I would team up with to make a game in 48 hours. All said and done, it would suffice to say, that the fact that almost all of them were half my age, did cause me to be a bit...anxious. The site opened (Hanze Hogeschool) and loads of students poored in. After all the setting up, video of the theme (Repair was it for this year), our team had to find a spot to get acquainted and get an idea going. 

To be fair, it didn't feel like 5 people who didn't know each other. We went through the motions of introductions, but basically we already felt quite comfortable in our setting. Respect in a way and open and honest communication did do the trick. So after many ideas and different perspectives from each member, we settled for a repair the ship/base/castle something that is being broken down slowly. The game loop was simple, the mechanics fun and there were still loads of things to decide. 

After an hour or so, we got the basics for the game design down. Especially Gaspar's knowledge of how to maintain a good balance in a game helped. For the rest, age showed no limitation to either. The youngest of the group had some of the best solid ideas (and solutions), thanks Omorian. I did press the fact that we should playtest on paper. This is not so much the best thing I learned from last year, but I did experience the worth of it in the development last year. I convinced everyone to go with it and effect it did have. Where things weren't clear one of the five would state so and we would come to conclusions that we needed to adjust such economics in the game or change perspective on what a certain part in the game would do. The smartest of the bunch took the time to write out the whole technical design from that playtest and caused so much information to be formatted already, that developing the mechanics was quite easy. Yeah, Machteld will get there.

I really urged to talk through what parts of the development stage each would feel most comfortable in and whether they wanted to fill that space or wanted to step out of their comfortzone (These jams can be hit or misses on that kind of thing, but not trying is not learning). After this session we could already start with the first development steps. And wow did we get going. Though as an older person, I knew I couldn't keep up with lack of sleep as these youngster could, the energy flowing as we got the first steps running, was...exhilarating. One of the team would work until 6 (where I really had to step out at 4) at night. Not one, but 2 days in a row. In the end, we were proud of what we had accomplished. Mostly I think because we all had our say in our own field of expertise. 

So, everything went peachy? Nope, we had a couple of rough moments. When for instance graphics were done but the animation approach was conflicting between developers. Or when we nearly lost several hours of work of UI development because of a revert on Github between two pushes of another developer. Eventually I think everyone was happy and we all had a learning period. 

Queen of the Hill is a strong game technically, visually and feature wise. Could we have done things different? Yes, we could have chose to make it ourselves a bit easier by going full 3D or full 2D. Having two programmers on a team of 5 is great, but eventually you will run into conflicts in such a short window of development. Eventually I think I would have traded myself for an artist. That would have been an ideal mix: Designer, Programmer, Audio and visuals, and a 2D and 3D artist. That way UI and gameobjects would have been separately developed. It would have however put a lot of strain on the designer to coach them.

I had a way better feeling when we finished this game jam and I would definitely do it again with the same group. We kept to a scope that was manageable and expandable, which caused us to deliver a solid game, even when the game loop could have been more diverse.

Advice: Be a team, trust each other, dare to choose.