Last year, I went to Gamescom. Now, this would not really be a surprise, if it weren’t for the fact that I didn’t go there to play or look at games, but to make one. Indeed, there was a GameJam at Gamescom, organized by InnoGames, a large studio from Hamburg. They gathered 180 developers from all over the world (but mostly Germany), put them in a large hall in the conference center, and let them make games. As an inspiration, there was a very nice talk from Adriel Wallick, who not only organizes the TrainJam every year, but also spent an entire year making one game every week, so she could tell us lots of things about making games in a very short time. After that it was time to form the groups, and while I had some trouble at first, partially due to unclear statements regarding the maximum group size, but in the end I grouped up with three 3D artists from the SAE institute in cologne, and one programmer from Trier, and we set out to make a game.
You can see the result of the 48 hours here: Ghosty McGhostface
The games were judged by different developers, because apparently there are a lot of those at Gamescom, but the only one I recognized was Rami Ismail from Vlambeer, who had previously given a talk at my university. In the end, we unfortunately didn’t win anything, even though we definitely felt that we should have. But that isn’t the point of going to GameJams anyway. What I did get from it was not just a fun time, but I also met a bunch of new people (that I actually had a reason to talk to…) and got to see a bunch of different game ideas in one place. It was also the first time ever for me at the Gamescom, so of course I also went through the halls and checked out some of the booths, but most time was spent on the game of course.
One specific thing that I took away from the experience was the kind of games that work well at a GameJam. Firstly, while most people worked on 2D games, there were also some 3D games, like the VR games for example, and they were not any worse for it. This of course is heavily dependent on the workspeed of the artists, but with enough experience a 3D workflow can be just as fast as 2D, as long as not too much time is spent on polishing of the art. However, the one exception here are probably animations. We avoided this problem by making our character a ghost without a normal body, and we could then use 3D rotation, so we didn’t have to do a front and side view of the character for example. But aside from that, what I noticed during the entire Jam was that games that multiple people could play simultaneously, either multiplayer or other engagement with the game were far better received and had much more people playing them. One advantage is that there are a lot of people around to test a multiplayer game, which isn’t usually the case. Although I would probably advise against making an online multiplayer game, local multiplayer is a great idea.
And, no matter what game you make, don’t be shy to experiment. The most interesting games were those that used a system that you wouldn’t normally expect, like asynchronous multiplayer with one player on a PC and the other one in VR. But a simple multiplayer PvP game where your avatar would turn into your opponents avatar when you killed them was also a lot of fun. They experimented with the AirConsole software, that uses smartphones as controllers, allowing many players to participate in the same game, but without having complex online systems, as the game was still only running on one machine. Experimenting with new technology, such as a new engine, is also a good idea, but it is beneficial if at least one team member has some prior experience to prevent the progress from stopping entirely.