Hey, everyone! So, I’m new here and I’ve been checking out all the super helpful posts in this group. After reading about it being beginner-friendly (totally makes sense with that name, right?), I decided to join the My First Game Jam!
It just kicked off tonight, and I’m going solo on this one. The theme is “cycles,” and I’m drawing blanks on good ideas, but I’ll sleep on it and hope something clicks.
Basically, I’m crossing my fingers that someone here has some tips for a newbie like me diving into her first jam! I kinda got carried away chatting in the jam Discord till late, so now it’s time for some sleep. But I’ll be ready to jam in the morning! By the way, can I share what I create here, or is that not allowed?
Thanks, y’all! You’re the best! 🙌
Hello and welcome!
You’ve had some good tips there already from @[email protected] but I definitely want to emphasise the “have fun” part! Pace yourself, ask for help when you need it, and if you start to feel like you’re burning out and losing the fun please take a break.
If you get something submitted by the end, great, but if you overrun a little bit you should still be proud of what you made.
The biggest advice I have, which you’ve probably heard before but it bears repeating, is to make something small. When you think you’ve whittled down your idea to the simplest it could possibly be? Simplify it some more. Remember if there’s time left at the end of the jam you can always add more stuff, but overscoping from the start will stop you from finishing anything at all.
And on that note! Get a victory condition and game ending in as soon as possible. That way you’ve got a full start-to-end experience that could technically be submitted and would work, even if something unexpectedly takes you away from the jam.
You didn’t say which engine or anything you’re planning to use but on a jam-specific note, in their Discord you can ping mentors in each engine with e.g. @unity or @godot if your fellow jammers aren’t able to answer something you’re stuck on. I’m in there too (same username as here), technically only a Unity mentor but I’ve been learning Godot so will be keeping an eye on questions in that too.
Oh and p.s. we’d love to see what you make! You can update here, or I’ll be starting off a weekly “what are you working on?” thread so keep an eye on that too 🙂
And p.p.s please use version control.
Yes, the last one. Many people think version control is required only when collaborating and use it badly when mandated. Committing often with sensible messages will save so much time when figuring out why and when something broke and how to fix it so something else won’t break.
It’s saved me more times than I can even count, but somehow I keep finding myself begging quite experienced devs to use it. Seems weirdly specific to game devs, I have no idea what that’s all about!
Oh good lord 🤦♀️
Just have fun and publish anything, no matter how silly it feels. My advice would be more about the preparation:
- Choose and familiarise yourself with the tools, so you can concentrate more on the game and less learning the tools
- You don’t have to do everything from scratch, premade assets and reusing your own stuff is not cheating
- manage your expectations, go through the lower rated entries of previous jams to see what other people have managed
Re-iterating TeaHands and Walops points. I think for me the biggest one is to start small. Like…pick something small, and then go smaller than that. I find that it can be useful to set a bronze/silver/gold endpoint for yourself:
- Bronze is something you are sure you can complete in the time frame.
- Silver is where you think you can get to if you really push yourself and nothing bad happens
- Gold is where you can go if everything goes right all the time.
This can help with motivation, because “failing” can often make you stop working because you de-motivated yourself, but not quite reaching your furthest estimation is motivation to push yourself.
Also something to keep in mind is that if you don’t make your bronze goal at first, this just means that you have a skill that needs to be improved: scoping. This is something everybody struggles with. I have been a professional gamedev for 10 years and I still scope things to how I think things should go, or I scope time to “feature-complete” (ie it ticks the all the boxes it was supposed to), but not “complete” (there might be bugs, the art doesn’t look right/etc…)
Also, version control is super useful, not just for tracking down bugs as Walop called out, but also for motivation. If you commit at least one thing at the end of everyday, you are basically keeping a journal of your work. This can be useful to look back on and realize even if you feel like you didnt get that much done, you can go back and see “hey I actually did all this stuff over the last week!”
This x1000.
Re. Scoping, this is a really useful skill to nurture, that and accurately predicting how much time tasks are going to take you, which really go hand in hand.
Try to set up realistic goals/milestones for all your projects, not only gamejams, the bronze/silver/gold approach (which I’m borrowing if you don’t mind) is a really good start, specially for jams, for longer projects you might want to take those and divide them in smaller goals!
Analyze when finishing each task how realistic your time/effort expectations were and eventually you’ll nail your estimations more, you’ll finish way more games when they don’t creep in scope, ask me how I know!
Ah I love that bronze/silver/gold system, definitely gonna start incorporating that in my own stuff.
This tip is seriously amazing, thanks! I took notes for my next try, though judging by how this one turned out, what I thought was bronze might actually be more like gold. 😅 Guess I gotta put in some work and fine-tune things a bit more.
Hey, y’all! Just wanted to drop in and give a big shoutout to everyone in this thread. Tried to reply earlier, but my server went bonkers, and then yours went down too. Talk about bad luck! 💀
Anyways, it’s been a wild week, but your tips have been a total lifesaver! I might not finish everything this time around, but that’s alright. Gotta work on scoping down my projects a bit better. The jam community has been amazing, and I’ve learned a ton about Unity. Thinking of giving it another shot in the Winter version!
And, here’s a little confession: I’ve never used version control before, but after reading your replies, I’m totally convinced it’s a must-learn. 😅 Still getting the hang of it, but I can see how handy it’s gonna be. So, thanks for the nudge in the right direction.
