April 23, 2020
Personal Game Jam
Concept Creation Meetup
Game Jame Idea
I wanted to work on a smaller scale project personally to practice some programming techniques and systems I have picked up recently in a more practical sense, as well as focusing less on long term and large scale scaling of projects. This way I could focus more on trying to find solutions that work as opposed to the best solution, so I could continually progress and try out some new skills I have learned.
This led to this idea of creating a personal game jam for myself following similar rules that I used in an experimental games class to create projects. The game jam approach makes sure I don’t spend too many days on it. I am planning on spending about 5 – 6 hours on it for 2 days and seeing where I get with it.
Initial Concept Generation
The approach we used to come up with inspiration for a small scale project in experimental games was as follows in pairs of 2:
- Start with a single key word: I chose Earth in honor of Earth Day
- From that word, choose several words (usually 3) that first come to mind (alternating with partner) to create your tier 1 words
- Repeat this process with all your tier 1 words to create tier 2 (so usually ~9 words)
- Repeat until you have 3 or 4 tiers of words (can reduce number of words per word later so you don’t have a ton of words)
- As a pair, agree on one word from each tier that you like the most (you must include the starting key word as your tier 0 word)
- Use this group of words as inspiration for several game concepts as individuals
- Bring them together to narrow it down to your favorites and see what collaborative ideas you can make
- Flesh these ideas out and finally choose your project topic
We did this process in experimental games with a single partner, but I organized a group with three of my friends, Marino, Nick, and Justin, to do this process online. Since I am the only one actually creating a project, we needed to make some modifications for this process to work with effectively a group of 4.
When choosing our words, I decided to expand it to 4 words per word so each person got to contribute a single word for each word as we expanded tiers (until we got to tier 2, where I just had us do 2 words per word and broke it in half for two separate tiers, 3 and 4).
Here is the list of words we generated:
Word Selection
I find having to agree on the best words from each tier with someone else to be a useful process, but thought that agreeing on a single word with 4 people would be a bit much. To get around this, I split us into 2 pairs that did the process separately with the same group of words. Here are those lists we generated:
Initial Concept Building
We stayed separated in our two different pairs here to come up with basic game concepts over the course of 30 minutes. We decided to come up with 3 concepts each as a pair and come together to go over them.
Pair A (Justin and I) Concepts:
- You are a large crystalline space coral monster that consumes resources to grow and produce more coral monsters.
- Tree person that sucks up water in their roots to fuel a water cannon which propels them into space to mine resources. They can grow and upgrade to hold more water.
- Focus on the differences between water and space and the interesting physics each presents, as well transitioning between the two to create interesting game mechanics.
Pair B (Marino and Nick) Concepts:
- “Platformer where you can build things out of…WHIPPED CREAM (foamy substance) and you can apply PAINT to give the WHIPPED CREAM different properties. Different amounts of WHIPPED CREAM and PAIN(t) per level. He’s actually just drawing with whipped cream in a big ole’ cup of coffee.”
- “Multiplayer??? game where players are shown a beautiful PAINTing to recreate using WHIPPED CREAM. One player is the judge, the rest PAINT. Weird mechanics for the WHIPPED CREAM: gets more liquid-y over time, slides down the page the longer it sits. “
- Puzzle platformer where you can paint trees in the environment to match one of the four seasons to give various platforming effects to get through areas.
Final Concept Steps
With these 6 concepts together, I personally took them to build off of them and flesh them out (if possible) to decide on the one to move forward with the next day. I thought Pair B’s concepts were already decently formed so I did not need to spend much time with them, so I mostly needed to focus on building up Pair A’s concepts.
Summary
Overall I think it went pretty well. I underestimated the time needed to come up with concepts and flesh them out, so I will look to give that more time moving forward. I forget from my experimental games class we normally took our words home with us to think of concepts for one or two full days before reconvening to go over what we came up with as a pair, so something like that may be better in the future. I do have to say I was pretty pleased what we were able to put together in just 30 minutes though.
As the organizer of this tiny event, I was the only one sharing my screen for the majority of it to help facilitate the process. I would like to look into something where everyone could possibly draw on the same area (or share their screens to draw on) to help illustrate ideas with simple sketches, since I find that very helpful in this phase.
This was all done in preparation for my personal game jam, so I did not particularly include it in the general game jam time window. This doesn’t really matter since the timing is fairly arbitrary, but I did like having it as its own separate event leading up to my work time instead of also including in the game jam work time like a general game jam would function.