Close your eyes and imagine your dream video game. The game you would make if time and money was no option. (Imagine you want to make video games if you don’t.) The kind of game you wish existed, but doesn’t. Got it? Great. Now shrink that infinite deadline down to two weeks, and your budget down to zero. Welcome to game jams.

Most game jams are just for fun. People kill themselves for days or weeks trying to make something worth playing, and then they share their games for others to play and review. There’s a real sense of community during and after a game jam — a sense of having gone through something together, even if you worked on your game solo. There is a theme, and part of the fun is trying to come up with a clever interpretation of the theme. And after the jam, you get to see how others interpretted the theme.

In the case of PirateSoftware’s 15th game jam, the themes were “alchemy” and “shadows”. Every game was required to incorporate elements of both alchemy and shadows. My own game, a Minesweeper-inspired puzzle game called The Tincture, incorporated the themes both mechanically and thematically. Some people only really used one theme, giving the other only token incorporation. A few seem to have not included either theme. It was really interesting today playing through other people’s entries. There were a lot of games where you throw potions at enemies. And a lot of Potion Craft clones. PirateSoftware played the game recently on stream, so of course with a theme like “alchemy”, everybody’s first thought was a potion brewing game. But part of the challenge of a game jam is going beyond the obvious, and trying to come up with something clever.

A screenshot of the first level of The Tincture.

There were a lot of quite polished games made by 5-man teams with programmers, artists and musicians. Some you could even imagine seeing on Steam. But for some reason, my favourite I’ve played so far is Iliterate, a strange puzzle game. Spoilers: the entire game is written in jibberish. I thought it was some kind of cipher puzzle that I didn’t have time for, so I was about to close the game when I stumbled into the settings and clicked a dropdown that happened to be the language settings. And you could change your language from jibberish to English (among other things). Clever! The game is butt-ugly, janky, and crashed, preventing me from even finishing it, but I still liked it more than the million Potion Craft, potion-throwing, and Animal Well (another game PirateSoftware recently played) clone games.

As for my own game, I learned much more than I anticipated. For one, I tried out the Construct 3 game engine, which is a pleasant and cute engine I’ll never use again, since it aims to be beginner-friendly without actually being any easier to use than, say, Godot or Unity. I think that’s a condemnation of visual scripting in general. It might look like legos, but it doesn’t act like legos, and it’s no easier than text-based programming. It was still fun to try, though. I got better at making art, too. I spent a lot of time working on the art for my game, despite being a programmer. I think it looks alright. But all that time working on art took away from time working on the game. I didn’t have time to implement things I wanted to, like a volume slider, mobile support, and more animations. This all made me realize something weighty about my own life in general — I always try to do things by myself, and that’s stupid.

If I split my time between learning a bunch of disparate skills, like art, programming, music, etc., then I won’t get really good at any of them (except maybe coding, because I do that for a living). Especially on a hobby basis, there’s not time to master all these different skills. Instead, it’s better to team up with people who are good at the other stuff, and focus on what I’m good at. This sounds obvious, but sometimes anxiety doesn’t manifest as actual feelings of fear. Instead it presents as an inability to even consider options that would lead to fear. It’s not that working with others is scary — I simply haven’t considered it until now. Well, enough with that. I don’t know when I’ll do another game jam, but when I do, I’ll be doing it in a team.

Secret Rich Text Copyer for Substack