I spent a month off from my day job to focus on working on my game development skills, and really dive deep into a hobby I’d had on the backburner for many years.
What I did was sign up to five different Game Jams on itch.io and I want to spend the next few posts talking about each of them in detail.
A what?
So what’s a Game Jam? Well I had only really heard about them second-hand - some kind of 24-hour hackathon to create a game from scratch. There are legendary stories about how Minecraft and Celeste were born out of these environments - a high-pressure (if not immensely fun) melting pot of ideas, racing to get something fun in front of people to play and try something possibly new and innovative with no greater incentive than to have fun (and maybe bottle some lightning).
However, despite all this, the game jams I entered weren’t particularly time-limited. One went for over a month, while the shortest was about four days. They were fairly relaxed which was good - it gave me plenty of time to overlap some of them. Luckily I can context switch quite well and was able to work on a couple in parallel.
All of them had some kind of theme that was unveiled once it started and I found the more specific and constraining the theme the more comfortable I felt. I’ll talk about it in a later post, but the month long Github Game Jam had a theme of “Secrets” which was just about as vague as you can get (and a whole month to work on it!?)
Should I enter one?
As someone who has been sitting on game development as a hobby for quite some time and never really “published” anything, this was the push to get something in front of other people. Most jams have a discord you can join to hang out with other participants - a (generally) nice community of other folks who just want to get something done and fun. It was even kinda cool to see some people stream an entry or two on Twitch or YouTube. Even if they struggled to pronounce my deservedly obtuse username (I really need a better one).
So I wholeheartedly recommend entering a game jam if you are interested in the solo indie developer route; it forced me to make important tradeoffs, reduce the scope of something to its bare essence and take some artistic liberties so that I didn’t spend too long finessing pixels in Aseprite. With a small enough scope it’s easy enough to fit everything into your head too.