Blogs come in many shapes and sizes and they can be useful to reflect on something in order to learn from it. This post however is before the event. The event is game jamming! You might have read some books, followed some YouTube Tutorials, or even bought an online game development course, but have you ever made your own game from scratch? Would you be able to do it? How can you find out? How about a game jam? Yes, a game jam, where you make a game in a limited period of time on a surprise theme, might be just what you need. The reason is that you will potentially ‘force’ yourself to actually make your own game.

Are you ready?

This is the first question that comes to mind, and perhaps the main barrier to all kinds of challenges. The general advice seems to suggest you are always ready, as long as you are happy to make a mess of things and then learn from them. In this case, making a video game with time and theme constraints, you would think it best to have some basic knowledge and skills under your belt. That said, if you are considering taking part in a game jam, you must have some idea of how it works, at least enough to give a go.

Do you have the tools?

As many a YouTuber will tell you, you can apparently make a game with a mobile phone and construct nowadays. On the other hand, if you have a fairly decent computer, you can find all the tools you need for free. One of the most popular engines in this category is Unity, combined with visual studio. You can pretty much create everything you need within Unity and get assets from the Unity store, but other suggested free tools might be Gimp, Blender, and Audacity if you’d like to create your art and sound assets. Personally, the tools would be: Unity; Visual Code; Aseprite; and Ableton.

What about the code?

Although this goes back to the first question, coding does seem to be one of the main hurdles to independent video game creation. Some games can be made with minimal code, and it would probably be wise to keep your game jam game fairly simple in general. If you’ve only been following video and text tutorials up to now, making a game alone from scratch can seem like a giant leap into the unknown. Even with tutorials though, you may have found yourself Googling certain code snippets to fix out-of-date sections of tutorials. Making a game from your own head would just be like this, but with quite a lot of your code. So perhaps not as impossible as it first seems.

Have I got time for this?

Yes you have! Just because a game jam lasts a week, it doesn’t mean you have to spend every hour of every day working on it. Just keep it simple and finish something. That’s what you hear on YouTube at least.

So, where can I find game jams?

Probably all over the place. You can even set up your own one. Itch does seem to be quite a popular choice though. Here is the link to the game jams page where I got the image for this post from: https://itch.io/jams

To be continued…

Find this and the rest on: https://redninja83882493.wordpress.com/2023/02/10/game-jams-part-1