Jamming Postmortem

I took part in the Global Game Jam this weekend, and I have to tell you, it was a lot of fun. Version 1 of the game we created, The Game Of Nom, is available from the Global Game Jam site, and was voted third favorite at the location we were participating in, and I think that was a fair place for it to be (Move Mouse To Fulfill Destiny and The Beat were really awesome). I'm really happy with how the game turned out. It had the right feel and I think it really extracted the emotions from players that we wanted. The rules were simple enough that you could easily sit down and play it, hard enough that you could play for a while before winning, and interesting enough to be fun. That all said, the game is fairly buggy, especially when you're moving around flocks or trying to combine them, and that's a huge detriment to the game. At some point, Darren or I may actually fix a few of the issues and post a new version on the game jam site, but don't hold your breath.

So, for my own sanity and for future reference for everyone, I thought I'd do a post mortem of my experience.

What Went Right

1. Enlisting the full time help of an artist. Amanda did an amazing job of giving us a feel for the game very early. I have no doubt that without her, the game wouldn't have been nearly as fun or interesting, and wouldn't have achieved this balance of fun and message that we wanted. By having a cute style to the game, we were able to present the dark message without seeming overly pretentious, which was awesome. My new rule is "artists make things look cool quickly," so get them involved early and things will look cool early, and get everyone really energized for the rest of the jam.
   
2. Having a team. The first game jam I participated in, it was just me. Now, that was great for rapid iteration, but not for making something really interesting. I didn't have anyone to bounce ideas off of, and no one to really keep me focused and in line. Working with Darren not only allowed us to do something a little bit more complicated than we would have been able to do alone, but also ended up producing a much better product.
   
3. Not sweating the small stuff. For the most part, I think we did a good job not worrying about some of our problems until later, and getting the game playable quickly so we could test it and refine it as needed, instead of spending lots of time doing things like improving the flocking behavior (which, I'll admit, I spent a little too much time on anyway ). The key to Jams is knowing when things are "good enough," and I think we did a pretty good job with that.
   
4. Tools choice. Although we had some problems with it, XNA/C# is a really great prototyping language. Right before the Jam, Darren and I were considering other options, including the beta of Unity that was made available to the jammers. The things was, we didn't want to spend lots of time fighting to get things on screen and working, when we could spend time on the game play. XNA didn't give us a lot of pain for our simple little 2D game, and for that we were pretty thankful.
   

What Went Wrong

1. Needing a prototyping framework. XNA is awesome, but it's not a great prototyping framework. As I don't do too much prototyping, I really don't know what I need and what's overkill. I found that the two things I really ended up wanting / needing were a simple object manager and an actor framework / state machine framework. We actually implemented states very late in the process and they were very hacked together. I found myself wishing we'd had OnEnter / OnExit / ChangeState for the little blobs frequently, but implementing states would have taken more time than hacking around them. In this respect, we maybe should have gone with Angel which has that stuff already built in, but it'd come out the day of the Jam, and I didn't want to try to learn it while Jamming (I've learned my lesson from the OLPC jam).
   
2. Clear message, not so clear implementation. We knew what we wanted to get across to the player early, but not how to do it, and trying to discuss it mid jam was hard. Another twenty minutes talking about implementation would have helped, though during our initial discussion I was itching to get things running. What we really should have done is a "stand up" style meeting when everyone arrived in the morning to discuss where we were, and where we wanted to be each day. I think it would have helped a lot.
   
3. Not enough testing / balancing. We should have pulled in more people to play the game earlier, and should have gotten things for Amanda to play so he should see the results of her art changes quickly. As it was, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday balancing, but was so close to the game that I missed little problems. Having just one person play mid-day Saturday would have exposed lots of problems that could have been fixed by the deadline.
   

I'd love to know what people have to say about the game. We're rating well, and I think if we get around to fixing the bugs, it will rate even better. Thanks to everyone who organized the Game Jam for this great opportunity!