First Game Jam

Goals

During this first of two three-week game jams the team I was with decided to make a top down pixel art game, based in a shop where you as the shopkeeper need to stop the “Hero’s” from stealing an object (like the master sword). This presented me the opportunity to learn how to use the tile mapping feature within unity. To help me achieve this I set myself some goals using S.M.A.R.T.

Specific goal
Gain an understanding of how to use tile sets.
Measurable targets
Over the 3 weeks of the game jam I will measure this through the use of the tutorials on this subject. I plan to work my through all of them over the 3 weeks.
Attainable can I do it
If I stick to my set goals then yes.
Relevant
As Carpenter et al (2021) points out that “Tile-based maps are used in a wide variety of games, including Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Super Mario Bros” making it a useful skill for any game designer to have. Also, it is relevant to the current game jam.
Time for goal.
This game jam will last 3 weeks.

The Jam

Overall, I did not end up making or using a tile map for this Jam. This was mostly because of the time it ended up taking to make the assets. As a group we should have used a premade asset pack not made all of them from scratch. This would have given all of us more time to focus on other things in my case using tile maps. As Locke et al (2015) observes “Game Jams are meant to encourage creative experimentation and to develop rapid prototypes of game designs.”
Ideally you want to get to a point where you can play and test your concept as soon as possible. In the case of this Jam there was no game play until the last day of the Jam meaning there was no time to test the concept to see it had any potential as a fun and enjoyable game. Ramzan and Reid (2016) state that “Game Jams provide a great way to test a concept and determine whether or not that concept should be turned into a full product.”

Apron reflection the team was not as devise as it could have been. The team consisted of five designs and a programmer. (It should be observed that one the designers did his degree in programming) Ideally this should have been a more devise and balanced group of disciplines including an artist or two and one more programmer. This could have been achieved at the expense of 3 of the designers. Musil et al discusses how a good game gam consists of a team that is multidisciplinary observing that “each team member comes from orthogonal knowledge domains e.g. programmer, graphic artist, audio designer”.

Lastly there was a small amount of over scope. As Baily and Miyata (2019) explain that. “It is also important to get scope “correct” early, because later cuts in scope could result in wasted resources.”
As observed earlier Game Jams allow for rapid prototyping. I designed two levels this was not necessary and I should have used my time more productively by focusing on gaining a better understanding of tile mapping or working on the UI.

References

Bailey, E. and Miyata, K., 2019. Improving video game project scope decisions with data: An analysis of achievements and game completion rates. Entertainment Computing, 31, p.100299.

Carpenter, D., Bacher, J.T., Crain, H. and Martens, C., 2021, October. Casual creation of tile maps via authorable constraint-based generators. In presented at 1st Workshop on Programming Languages and Interactive Entertainment.

Locke, R., Parker, L., Galloway, D. and Sloan, R.J., 2015, June. The game jam movement: disruption, performance and artwork. In 2015 workshop on game jams, hackathons and game creation events (co-located with FDG-2015).

Musil, J., Schweda, A., Winkler, D. and Biffl, S., 2010, May. Synthesized essence: what game jams teach about prototyping of new software products. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering-Volume 2 (pp. 183-186).

Ramzan, R. and Reid, A., 2016, October. The importance of game jams in serious games. In 10th European Conference on Games Based Learning: ECGBL 2016 (pp. 538-546). Academic Conferences and Publishing International Ltd.(ACPI).