i understand that artists tend to connect with like-minded artists. the internet assists greatly in bringing us all together. and the world around "indie" games and thereabouts is a small one as it is. i know that it's inevitable that many of us will make friends with each other. but i don't think it's a desirable situation for everyone to be friends with everyone else. why? because i don't think there are any adequate incentives for people to be critical of their own friends.
Liz Ryerson on everyone knowing everyone else that makes and writes about independent videogames. [May 8th, 2013] (via her blog).
In different ways, I consider all of my completed games successes. Each one is designed with a different goal in mind. Some are played by hundreds of thousands, some have never left my hard-drive. Some have made thousands of dollars, some have cost more than they were worth. But they all have their place.
TrueValhalla, contemplating the differing successes that each of his videogames has accomplished. [June 4th, 2013] (via ask.fm).
Thinking seriously about game design makes me depressed for some reason. Maybe it's because I know I'm not a really good designer and I don't want to think about that (probably not something I should feel too bad about, having had zero design training).
Merritt Kopas, judging herself harshly as a videogame designer. [April 2nd, 2013] (via twitter).
My name is Dominique Ferland, and I'm a 29 years old game designer - I make games and art under the pseudonym Dom2D. At the age of 6, I was drawing dozens of Mario Bros. levels on loose sheets of paper. Through high school, I came up with card games and forced my friends to test them out. In college, I moved into advertising and graphic design but kept playing video games and board games.
After 3 years of working on casual games at Ludia, I discovered the indie game development community in Montreal, thanks to our local Mount Royal Game Society meet-ups, where we would have a beer and show the games we'd made in the past month. I made new friends who actually understood my passion for games and game design. This gave me the motivation to start my own indie projects in my spare time and to try to be indie. I had trouble finding people to work with, so I said "I'll do it myself"!
I bought and borrowed tons of books like "Programming for Dummies" and a plethora of game design theory books, and through countless, sleepless nights, I managed to create a couple tiny indie games (including Geek Mind, a trivia game about video games). Despite its very limited scope, Geek Mind became quite successful and actually got me a job making an indie game for Mochi Games. So I quit my job at Ludia, and started working from home! I've been doing contract work for a couple game companies and creating my own indie games ever since.
The day I left my job at Ludia is also the day I started my very first game jam at the Global Game Jam, and I've been to every jam I could since then.
You've participated in the likes of both Ludum Dare, TOJam and Global Game Jam. If you had to choose which format you preferred would it be the physical game jam or the isolated game jam?
A building populated with tons of people making games at the same time is the best place to jam. In the first few hours, I can feel the excitement and the creative energy of every team surrounding mine. In the next couple days, whenever I feel a little tired or uninspired, I can just get up and go chat with a random team to get a little motivational boost. In the last couple hours, everyone is trying everyone else's game, getting great feedback and giving congratulations - it feels like a party stretched out for 48 hours.
Isolated jams are also great but they just feel a bit more like work. I think development is more focused and clear, but it lacks the community aspect, where random people might come by and chime in their ideas or offer useful feedback through the weekend. Which is why the last time I did an isolated game jam with the Neverpants team, we invited a bunch of our artist and programmer friends to work or chill at our studio while we were jamming!
You seem to enjoy participating in game jams within a team. What is attractive about collaboration within a game jam structure?
The greatest thing about working in a team is... I don't have to code! I developed and coded a couple games in Flash before, and played around in Game Maker a little bit, but overall, I wouldn't say I can make a game on my own, especially not in 48 hours.
Team work also makes game design much, much easier throughout the jam. Since there is so little time, everyone is super direct in the game design discussion. If someone feels a certain gameplay element does not work, we throw ideas and tweaks around until we're all happy with the direction. If in the middle of the jam someone thinks a certain feature is risky, he just says it and we react immediately. There is no lengthy meeting or e-mail thread - everything is resolved right then and there with the team.
Are you usually assigned to a particular role (or is there a particular role you feel comfortable filling) within those collaborations or does it differ from time to time?
I'm pretty efficient at doing 2D art for a game jam, so that's usually my role. I think game design comes second, since the design of a jam game is much more of a team effort than the usual game development process.
I love doing the art for a game jam because it's very much based on instinct - there isn't much time for concept art and art direction discussions, so I have to rely on my creative inspiration at that moment. It creates some weird, fun new art styles, settings or characters. The time constraint also makes me come up with efficient or stylish ways to create content - making the game black and white or have characters be just heads, for example.
You participated in Indie Speed Run, which had a an entry fee and high profile judges. What elements attracted you to participate in this jam?
In the past year, I started a team we call Neverpants, with Ian Girard and Pierre-Luc Poirier. While we were working on Greedy Piggy Chase, we found the announcement for Indie Speed Run to be quite attractive with its famous judges ("Ron Gilbert will play our game!!!"). Although now that I think about it, its best feature was letting participants pick any date to jam on, between December and early January.
Now that Indie Speed Run is over, I gotta thank the organizers for a super smooth and fun experience throughout. Organizing a jam is a lot of work, but following up with a good website to play the games on, having voting sessions, revealing judges' picks and making an awards video like they did made the whole event feel bigger. It probably gave the games more visibility than other jams.
What effect do you think introducing competitive aspects have on game jams and their creative output and atmosphere?
I kinda hate it. I usually don't care about "losing" contests, but in my first jam, after an intense, mostly sleepless weekend, I had fallen in love with the game we had made and suddenly cared a lot more about what people thought of it. I wanted the game to win, so my team's efforts could be rewarded with some silly sponsor-provided prize. It made the last few hours of that jam totally suck - I was cursed by the competition.
Since then, I've learned to not care about "winning" or "losing" a game jam. It really doesn't matter, as long as you've learned something and had fun making a game, no matter how crappy or awesome it is. I think it sucks to get new participants in this competitive mood, while co-operation and sharing are the key to a great jam.
The best way to reward participants is with a big raffle - everyone gets a chance to win something, and it makes for a cool gathering at the end of the jam.
Now that you've participated in a number of game jams, what effects do you think it has had on you as a game developer? Have you learnt anything profound or refined your work methods?
The jamming process taught me to let go. No matter how great you think your first idea is, it's practically 100% certain that if you let it go, you'll come up with a better one. During the jam, time constraints and technical issues can radically change your idea too - it's fine, let it go. Use those limits to create something slightly different. And if your end product is unplayable, it doesn't really matter, as long as you had a good time with your friends, and have learned something from that so-called failure - let it go! Of course after the jam you can go back and try to fix your game, if you think the idea is good enough.
Another important thing I got from game jams - sleeping is a good idea. Not just during game jams, but in general. Lack of sleep turns me into an annoying, unproductive shell of a guy. I realized that working in a focused manner for solid chunks of time is way better than losing creativity and focus for every hour of sleep that I skip. I still do work super late at night sometimes, but I do take my sweet time to wake up the next morning!
Can you remember any specific instances where you were taken out of your comfort zone at a game jam?
In the past couple jams, I've had the chance to work with experienced developers and all-around cool people. Both Neverpants and Les Collégiennes are awesome, fun teams to work with, so it always feels pretty comfortable to work with them. Before this I also worked with cool people, but they were set on making games in 3D, a medium I'm not very at ease with.
While making Alphanauts, I had a physical breakdown half-way through - I think eating pizza and drinking gigantic energy drinks while having a bad cold might not be a great idea during a jam! I was super tired on the last day, but we made it through with a fun little experimental game.
I'm Jeremy Penner, a 30-year-old programmer from rural Manitoba, currently living in Ottawa, ON in Canada. I've been making videogames more or less since I learned how to read. I founded Glorious Trainwrecks in 2007, started an online monthly 2-hour game jam called the Klik of the Month Klub, and organized the first Pirate Karts, where people are encouraged to make as many games as possible in a single weekend.
I play the guitar badly, the accordion atrociously, the piano fairly well, and I'm currently employed making audio tour apps for museums.
You started Glorious Trainwrecks over 5 years ago. How did it all begin?
So, around the time I started Glorious Trainwrecks, I had recently started working in the US at a small company started by a wealthy computing pioneer doing ambitious R&D-type work, building a tool for software development that I was pretty sure was going to change the world. This was surreal dream-job territory for me; for the first time in my career, I was working at a place where I believed strongly in the importance of what I was doing, working with people that I admired greatly. I once got a phone call from my boss FROM SPACE. This was everything I thought I'd wanted in life.
Except that it turned out I was miserable and that I had stopped doing anything that was any fun at all. I was living in a foreign country with no real friends except my wife, and I was paralyzed by a terrible perfectionism - an unshakable terror that if I wasn't meticulously careful, if everything wasn't just so, if I didn't work hard enough, if I wasn't smart enough, I would screw all of it up. I had gotten fired from my previous (terrible) job after a month because I couldn't motivate myself to do it; now I worked at what I'd believed would be my dream job and I still had trouble.
So one day I was up at 2AM playing old DOS freeware and thinking about the terrible QBASIC games I had enjoyed making so much as a kid, when I dug out a game called The Last Eichhof, and I realized that I hadn't played anything so delightfully stupid in a long time. I was more inspired by failed videogame experiments than anything else in my life, so I decided that I'd create a place to celebrate them, and make more of them. It was really just an excuse to give myself permission to make imperfect stuff, and talk about playing weird 3DO games.
Klik of the Month is a 2 hour game jam that happens once a month. Explain the appeal of making a game in 2 hours?
The two hour time limit came about kind of arbitrarily, but I like it because it forces you to be really decisive. If you're going to make a game in two hours, there is no room for second-guessing yourself: you ask yourself a question, and you pretty much run with the first answer that pops into your head. It gets you into a habit of saying yes to yourself.
The other nice thing about the 2 hour time limit is that basically anybody can set aside two hours of their lives to do something. It's hard to set aside an entire weekend for doing just one activity, especially if you're worried that you might not get a result that you're happy with. But if you commit to having a game at the end of two hours, no matter how stupid or broken, well, that's basically a strictly better use of your time than say, watching a bad movie on TV.
What do you hope to achieve with Glorious Trainwrecks and Klik of the Month?
When I started, I just wanted to play weird games and encourage my friends to make weird games. In that, I've been way more successful than I'd imagined. I host more weird, amazing games now than I could possibly ever play.
I'd really like to see other people doing the same thing. I'd love to put out some kind of a game-making-community-in-a-box; something that anyone could easily set up so that they could have a place to make stuff with their friends; personal spaces for people to create together with people that they like and trust.
But really, Glorious Trainwrecks is about removing roadblocks to creativity. I was very conscious of all of the things that I was putting in my own way when I started running it - mostly from seeing one of my good friends have trouble getting going and realizing that they were probably problems for him, too. Everything flowed from the simple idea that you should just make SOMETHING. We lay out rules for Klik of the Month, but it's a common refrain that if there are any rules that get in the way of you making what you want to make, rather than helping, then you should disregard them.
You've had enthusiastic support and participation from all manner of videogame developers such as Leon Arnott, Sergio Cornaga and chuchino all the way to the likes of higher profile videogame developers, Anna Anthropy and Terry Cavanagh. Did you expect such high profile and loyal participants?
That is something I'm really proud of, that people who make their living on indie games participate in the same event as people who have never made a game before, and everyone is comfortable and happy with that. But when I started, no, I was pretty much assuming it was going to be me and a couple of buddies who were also into weird games, posting some stuff for a few months before we all lost interest and moved on to something else.
Anna and I actually worked together writing for the Gamer's Quarter, years ago. She's been pretty instrumental in championing the cause and helping me understand the value in what I had built.
Have the higher profile names in turn attracted a higher level of participation?
Given that I do absolutely no promotion of the community on my own, probably. Definitely when Rise of the Videogame Zinesters came out, we saw a number of people show up and make their first game and put it up on Glorious Trainwrecks, which was pretty cool. But the community has remained pretty small over time. I don't think we've ever had a Klik of the Month with more than, say, 20 people submitting something.
I honestly have no idea how people find us and decide to participate. Certainly the Pirate Karts have been helped with a lot with prominent indies spreading the word, and there's always some portion of people who stick around after a Pirate Kart. But as far as the people regularly showing up and making games? I have no idea how people find us or what makes them stick around.
There's a line on the front page of Glorious Trainwrecks: "Together, you and I will bring the true spirit of indie gaming back." Explain what this means?
People just doing what they want to do and putting it out into the world. You know, when I was growing up, my role models were college kids who were making stupid games in their spare time. I'd write letters to shareware authors. I remember working very hard as like a 12-year-old to track down the authors of a game called Megapede so that I could write them an earnest letter about how sampling one-liners from movies for sound effects probably was in violation of copyright law, because I was worried they'd get in trouble.
I have a deep and abiding love for old shareware, because it was almost all made by people who didn't have the resources to compete with what was being sold in stores, so they just kind of did what they could. They just had a good time making stuff, the best way they could figure out how. Like, I remember when South Park first came out, and people wanted so badly to play South Park videogames that the only thing they could think to do was to make horrible platformers and Space Invaders clones in Klik & Play. I just love that enthusiasm, that desire to make something even though you don't really know how. That's what I had in mind when I wrote that.
What are your thoughts on longer 2 or 3 day game jams such as Ludum Dare or Global Game Jam?
Love 'em! I did Ludum Dare for years before I started Glorious Trainwrecks. Anything that gives people an opportunity to try to do something that they really want to do is a great thing in my book.
That said, one thing about other game jams that really bugs me is when there's emphasis on competition. As soon as you make it a contest, you have to have "rules" to make sure that it's "fair", or whatever. Maybe that gets other people excited? I don't know. I sort of find it discouraging, when I'm not actively ignoring it, which is generally how I deal. If I take four days to make something for Ludum Dare, say, I don't want to get told my work doesn't count. The point of making games isn't to see who is better at making games, it's to make what you want to make.
When I was six, we got our first computer at home. It was one of those giant IBM 386’s with MS-DOS on a floppy drive. It had no such thing as a hard drive, so it had to load the operating system into RAM before it would boot, but after it had booted, you could switch the floppy for another one. I always switched it for a floppy that said ‘GORILLAS’ – a small file full of code that ran a game with gorillas throwing explosive bananas at each other.
Being curious but not understanding a word of English, I started changing things in the code, which led to things in the game changing too. I was fascinated by how changing simple characters led to the game changing in some way. That fascination never let go. Thus, I started programming. My fascination with systems and optimal solutions evolved through many, many things – I did some space art for a while, teaching myself Photoshop (and a general abuse of filters), I did some web design at some point, I did interface design and for a while, I did marketing and business for a commercial studio on the side.
At some point in your life, you have to decide what it is you really want to do. I had been working on failed projects continuously for a decade by the time high school wrapped up, but I’d been involved in a few successful ones too. I decided to enroll into a game design university. I’d love to say it was a mistake, because schools are generally terrible at teaching you anything related to creativity, but school did introduce me to a lot of people - amongst them Jan Willem Nijman, with whom I dropped out of university to start Vlambeer almost 2.5 years ago.
Vlambeer opened my eyes to a side of game development I had not encountered before: the indie game community. More than just inspired, I was amazed by how accepting, diverse and co-operative this scene was – and through it, slowly but surely I fell for the less obvious charms of our medium. My fascination shifted from just how I can optimize the logical system behind games to how we can use, explore and apply those systems to games.
In the past two years, I learned so much about who I am, what I do and what I can do – by making games, by discussing with people far smarter than I am. Last year, I spoke at events around the globe about game development, business and marketing. Between those talks, I spent a lot of my year traveling around the world to meet with such people, to talk with them and learn from them. I learned that I have a knack for marketing and tried to figure out how I could give that back to the indie scene, which cumulated in me developing presskit(), a free framework that helps indies market their games. In Austin, I met Mexico-based developer Fernando Ramallo, with whom I conceived Fuck This Jam.
In the meanwhile, Jan Willem and I released 16 games as Vlambeer. We are involved in organizing local indie meetups, events, game jams, workshops & seminars to students that aspire to become game developers.
My name is Rami Ismail, age 24, and I’m the business & developer guy at Vlambeer, a two-man independent studio in the Netherlands best known for Super Crate Box, Radical Fishing, GUN GODZ and our upcoming game LUFTRAUSERS.
The concept of Fuck This Jam was to get game developers, developing games in genres they disliked or hated, essentially bringing people out of their comfort zone. Do you think more game jams have an obligation to challenge developers in more profound ways and bring them out of their comfort zones in differing ways?
Game jams – to me – always represent stepping out of your comfort zone on purpose. Fuck This Jam just took that core idea and intentionally made it the central theme of the jam. A good game jam forces you to make something – to go through the process of creation. A great game jam forces you to make something that you couldn’t make otherwise. The other Vlambeer co-organized game jam, 7DFPS, asked indies to make first person shooters.
For Fuck This Jam, the idea Fernando and I had was to push people into areas they are utterly uninformed about, to see what happens when someone with little or no former knowledge of a genre, its hit titles, its appeals or its conventions, gets to make a game that has to conform to the most basic truths of a genre.
Fuck This Jam lasted a week where other game jams generally last anywhere between 2 hours to 3 days. Why 1 week?
Fuck This Jam was a jam about intentionally exploring the unknown – something that two or three days simply wouldn’t offer enough time for. The idea was that participants would pick a genre, figure out what it is that makes games in said genre interesting – reflect on that and then proceed to make something that they would like to play.
We tried to offer an optimal timeframe to allow exploration and implementation. We’d much prefer participants spending a day researching and thinking than having to rush through that phase because there are only thirty hours left. We’d much rather see that they’d spend time in the IRC-chat discussing a genre than not having proper time for that.
Ultimately, we decided that one week would allow people to explore, implement and discuss amongst each other. It’d also allow people that couldn’t join in right at the start some ample time to join in later.
What do you think the boundaries of a game jam should be?
The definition of a ‘jam’, to me, is any pre-set amount of time that you pick to force yourself to work on a non-routine task. I don’t really think a game jam should have boundaries.
There’s been a lot of talk about game jams and what they should and shouldn’t be. Recently, a group of developers organized a Depth Jam – a week long discussion about specific, often high-level design problems in games they have been working on for an extended period - and framed it as a response of sorts to ‘short’ jams.
What I do worry about is the notion that a ‘jam’ could be a bad thing. I’ve heard criticisms of short jams wasting the potential of great game designers, or people complaining that the amazing One Game A Month-initiative will only lead to incomplete games – or the other extreme, criticisms of the Depth Jam just not really being a jam in the first place. Hearing such things is always a tad disheartening to me. The way someone choses to explore their craft is their own - if that is spending a year prototyping twelve games, which might lead to stumbling upon something amazing – that’s great. If you prefer to spend time on arguing about design issues, that’s great too.
The only thing jams are –or should be- is a tool to force yourself out of your normal working patterns – and whether you use that tool to socialize, to be creative in one short, explosive burst or to discuss high-level design issues is not something I have strong feelings about.
Retrospectively, was organising Fuck This Jam worth the payoff or a fulfilling experience for you? Did Fuck This Jam accomplish what you hoped that it would?
Organizing Fuck This Jam is one of those things that, if you had known before you started how much work it would be, you might’ve never done it altogether. However, having done it, you know how amazing the payoff can be. Browsing through the games made for Fuck This Jam – dozens, hundreds of games – and seeing the occasional gem between those games is oddly rewarding.
Looking at some of the games made during the jam, like Desperate Gods, Crystal Crashers, 52 or Dear Esteban, we were surprised by how diversely people have applied the theme. Some of these games are an analysis of genres, others are satires. Some games are an attempt at understanding, or a way to subvert the conventions of a genre as a means to create something the creator would like.
We gave people a small push & they ventured onward, into territory they’d never dared before. That’s more than we had hoped for when the idea for Fuck This Jam came to be at an Austin bar, both me and Fernando far away from our homes.
Has this experience given you a taste for to organise any other game jams? Would you like to keep pushing the boundaries of game jams in new and different ways or is Fuck This Jam going to become an annual event?
The thing I really want to achieve is pushing things in a direction. I don’t really care whether people would classify the direction I’m pushing as forward, or backward – or any other direction for that matter – I just want to move things in a direction.
With presskit(), I tried to offer something that would allow any developer – regardless of their marketing skills – to offer information in a way that the press appreciates. My hope was that all these beautiful games that I see that are lost to obscurity could somehow find their way to a larger audience – to touch more people.
With Fuck This Jam, the goal was to see what can happen when people are tasked with creating something they do not fully understand yet. We strongly believe that ignorance is a worthy perspective in matters of creation, too. We hoped that Fuck This Jam would lead to beautiful games.
On the other hand, we also have a lot of ideas on the format of game jams being inherently introverted. For a hypothetical next Fuck This Jam, we’d like to play around with the format of game jams a bit more. It’d be great if we, as developers, can show the world the raw process of creation in games – the variety of perspective, the personal expression and the hours of work that go into even the simplest of games.
What are your thoughts on game jams (in their many current forms)?
Some game jams bring people in touch with each other, some allow people to practice, discuss, co-operate or compete. Some do all of that at once. But there’s one thing that any game jam does: they get people to make games. That’s a worthwhile cause.
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