Game Jam

This weekend I participated in the Guernsey edition of Global Game Jam, an event where participating teams have just 48 hours to create a game from scratch, based on a prompt given at the start of the event. This year's theme was 'what home means to you', which is... vague.

It was my first time doing the event, and our team consisted of a telecomms engineer, a dotnet developer, two python developers and myself, a web developer. We decided to build our game in Unity, of which only one of us had any experience (and it wasn't me!) - in fact, only two people knew any C# at all (and again, I was not one of them). Our interpretation of 'what home meant to us' mainly revolved around frustrating and arduous driving experiences, and so the concept was that the player would drive around a map of Guernsey, attempting to reach her destination, while a series of obstacles such as randomly-generated road closures would stand in her way.

We actually managed to get fairly close to that in the time given. We managed to produce a game where the player could navigate round Guernsey, contending with suitably janky mechanics, and try to find a specific place having been given a tongue-in-cheek flavour text cue. There was a compass for guidance, if you veered off the road the car would slow to a crawl, and there were some pretty nifty engine sounds (I did those!). It was pretty fun, and I'm proud of what we achieved given how little collective experience we had.

I learned a huge amount from this experience. Aside from technical things, like learning a little C#, Unity and sound editing, I learned a lot about working in a team. We suffered a lot from not having someone in charge - nobody wanted to step on anybody else's toes, but that meant nobody stepped up with a grand vision for the project. Most importantly, nobody coordinated how we could all work individually and then pool our work into one finished product, meaning that the resultant game was contributed to significantly more by some team members than others. Effective communication was very important in this intense environment, and I think I improved as the weekend went by, so I am hopeful this will translate into better efficacy in my day to day job.

In retrospect I wish I had been able to contribute more to our game, either in the form of code or stepping up to fill the project manager type of role, but either way it was a huge amount of fun, I both laughed and learned a lot. I'll definitely be doing it next year, but hopefully I will have some Unity experience before then!