It’s Saturday evening and almost exactly 24 hours before the submission deadline for the Unity Game Jam and I’ve decided to throw in the towel.
Why?
Because most of today has been a write off. In this post I want to reflect on what happened, the positives, the negatives and the improvements I’ve identified for the next one.
What went well?
The game jam started off well and had a great theme: “Secrets.” It immediately conjured up a few images and rather than jump straight in with the trust old mind map brainstorm I felt like trying something new and went with the Crazy-8s. I didn’t have much time for anything else as I needed to take my son swimming and fitted very conveniently with my available time. Every minute counts as they say.
Crazy-8s is definitely something I need more practice with to wield effectively. It’s quick, convenient and simple so I’ll work it into my future ideation sessions. Next time I’ll also use paper instead of the whiteboard to see if that makes a difference. If you have firsthand experience of this, please let me know.
I followed this up with a family brainstorm – my wife and son were both eager to help out and that added a new dynamic. It was late when we started, nearly 10pm, so we kept the session deliberately short. Another positive here was the tight timescale: it maintained focus and stopped us analysing the ideas as we went. Instead as one person stuck a post-it on the board it often triggered ideas in the other two, particularly towards the end when ideas were coming slower.
When our time was up we quickly evaluated and grouped the ideas together to produce the final image, above. At this point a game idea had started to appear: a spy on a covert mission to infiltrate a secret lab and steal a formula. This had the potential to become a point-and-click or RPG adventure so was definitely workable and not excessively challenging to implement provided the scope was carefully managed.
I revisited the idea board on Saturday morning having slept on it overnight to give the subconscious a chance to work it’s magic. I liked what we’d come up with and left it untouched as pressure was staring to mount. Several other teams in the US had already posted early prototypes and I was still at the post-it stage.
Rather then just diving straight into the code I worked with my son to produce the story arc and elaborate on the different choices, puzzles and story threads available to the player. We ended up with four small ‘scenes’ and later chose to discard the first one leaving just three. Adding the UI scenes for the start, win and lose gave us six game scenes to develop.
By this point it was about lunchtime and it was here the whole project went south. So…
What went wrong?
Over commitment — the Unity Game Jam started at the mid point of the second week of the Falmouth jam and I was only about halfway through the development of my game for that. With 8 story points of work to complete on Friday evening, including my Week 5 Reflection post, I should have listened to my head, not my ego. Friday evening turned into early Saturday morning by the time I’d finished everything and that came with a cost. When I got up on Saturday I was suffering severe mental fatigue which I’m certain affected my performance, perception and ability to solve development problems.
Family interruptions — my wife was working on Saturday and I needed to look after my children. On most weekends this is trivial. They’re 17 and 15 so don’t need a huge amount of parental supervision. Today was no ordinary day though. Maybe it’s because I was under pressure, maybe it’s because I was very tired from pulling an all-nighter, but today I had an unprecedented number of family problems to deal with: I can’t log in; I need to go to the shops; now I’ve installed something, my laptop doesn’t work… Collectively, they form a very good example of the dangers of working on ‘urgent’ rather than ‘important’ tasks. For me, the jam was really important but the urgent items kept pulling me out of the zone and as each interruption incurred additional downtime for the context switch and to get back into the zone they were very costly indeed.
Development issues — this class of issues is very embarrassing as I normally eat these for breakfast. For some reason today, most probably because of mental fatigue, I struggled to solve even the simplest of problems. Applying an animation sequence to a model in Unity is usually relatively straightforward. Not today. Today, the player avatar model I’d obtained from the asset store wouldn’t take the animation sequence. It turned out to be an error in the model’s rig that was easiest to solve by using a different model from Mixamo and even that was not without its teething troubles.
Retrospective…
| Stop Doing | Keep Doing | Start Doing |
| Late nights! | Focus in ideation up-front | Find quiet space/time |
| Over commitment | Scope management | Gain familiarity with pre-made assets |
| Make excuses | Not hitting the tools too early | Family engagement and buy-in |
| Have fun with it | Listen to my head not my ego | |
| Stay above the line | ||
| Work in a team |
Learning Points and Future Action…
This was my second ever game jam and my first ‘failure’ at one. As such it offered a wealth of learning points and improvements that I will feed into the next one. Using the table above as a starting point, whet did I learn?
Go into it mentally prepared — Staying up to 3am on the Saturday to clear the backlog before attempting the game jam proper was definitely a bad idea. The resulting mental exhaustion significantly compromised my ability to deliver.
Don’t over-commit — Over-commitment was the root cause of my mental fatigue from the previous learning point. I listened more to my ego and my desire to accomplish rather than considering my workload and the time commitment needed.
Get family buy-in — Working through a game jam is a huge time commitment. As I mentioned in this post “I can be a good husband, a good father or a good businessman but I can’t be all three at once.” Each game jam I enter will take me away from my family and whilst I will be at home with them, I will also be working too. We, my family and I, will need to work out how to manage this together.
Join a team — working on my own was really hard. I’m grateful for my wife’s and son’s input in the early stages and that’s where I had the most success. It was doing the implementation on my own that I really struggled with. Being tired I found I quickly became frustrated and simple problems quickly became insurmountable mountains to climb. A team to bounce ideas around with would definitely have helped here.
Conclusion
Entering the Unity Game Jam was a valuable learning experience. I originally set out with the intent of creating a playable prototype by the deadline. Things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to but I now understand better the pressures and the commitment far better than I did before. Next time I’ll recruit a team, maybe from my fellow students, to work with and push through the project. Not only with this multiply up the available time but together everyone achieves more.
For this game jam I took the tough decision not to continue. I did this on the basis that my time would be more effective if spent working on the Falmouth game jam instead. That project is nearing beta readiness and with a guillotine cut-off of 7pm this Wednesday the additional day of development would reduce the risk of not completing.
I would like to thank the folks at Unity for hosting their game jam. Even though I chose to not submit I found it an invaluable learning experience.
List of Images
Figure 1. THORN, 2020 Unity Game Jam Crazy8 Ideation
Figure 2. THORN, 2020 Unity Game Jam Inspiration Brainstorm
Figure 3. THORN, 2020 Unity Game Jam Story Arc
