GB Jam 11 Post-Mortem
Last week I participated in my fourth game jam: GB Jam 11. The premise of this jam was to create a video game that fit the parameters of the original Game Boy. Participants had 10 days to accomplish this.
The game I developed and submitted is HA.X, a short arcade-style game about an advanced antivirus program that finds and destroys malware.
I had been looking forward to this game jam all summer. Especially after a previous game jam back in May, I was eager to keep the lessons learned from that jam in mind in order to have a successful time in this jam.
Before the jam started, I did two things. First, I set a goal for myself and what I wanted to accomplish in GB Jam 11. This mainly included submitting a finished, playable, polished game. Self-awarded brownie points for learning the in-engine music tracker to include audio - not as important as the technical aspects of gameplay.
Second, I outlined my schedule for the duration of the jam. This way I knew how much time I reasonably had to develop whatever was to be my idea. Going a step further, I set an even tighter deadline: I wanted a playable, functional version of the game by the fifth day. This way I was more likely to avoid last-minute scrambling to fix broken code and bugs, and instead time could be spent polishing and adding audio.
With these two tasks set, I was ready to hit the ground running.
The first day of the jam, I didn’t even think about touching the game engine. My plan was to spend the first day with paper and pencil brainstorming and idea-dumping possibilities for a game. Almost every game jam has a one-word theme, announced at the start of the jam. Luckily, the theme for GB Jam 11 was “Space.” Super malleable.
I set to work doing word association, writing as much as I could think of relating to “space.” Cyberspace was one of the words that stood out to me.
Then, I started thinking and writing what I could do with that word. Keeping my goal in mind of making a finished, polished game, I knew I needed to keep the game super simple. Arcade games are just that. Immediately I started looking up gameplay footage of various arcade games: Dig-Dug, Bosconian, Galaga, Pac-Man.
Pac-Man.
The “What If?” Olympics had begun.
What if Pac-Man had a cyberspace aesthetic? What if Pac-Man was trying to destroy the ghosts instead of avoiding them? What if Pac-Man was trying to destroy them AND avoid them at the same time? Well then he would need a weapon to do so. What if he had a sword? No, too basic. What if he had an axe? But how do I give it the Cyberspace aesthetic? Oh! What if I gave the game a Tron makeover? Yes!
This was generally my thought process. After maybe 20 minutes, I had my conceptual foundation: A Tron-like character set in Cyberspace, navigating a maze like Pac-Man, axe-swinging combat like Legend of Zelda, with a goal of destroying some type of cyber enemy in each level.
Bam. Love it. It’s canon.
I then wrote down the core gameplay loops - essentially what the player does and how the game functions. Time to go to my day job was fast approaching, so I wrapped up the morning of the first day writing out some enemy type ideas, including behavior (fast vs slow, high or low damage, etc.).
Oh, and I decided on the name, HA.X, which stands for Human-Artificial Executable. The name works from a few angles: it’s the titular character’s name, he uses an ax, and the connection to hacks (like hacking into a network).
Now, in taking only a few hours to prep the direction and scope of my game, I set myself up for a successful jam. By the third day, I had basic gameplay functions down. By the fourth day, I had a brief but stable prototype. By the fifth day, I had a solid prototype and knew I likely wouldn’t be scrambling at the last minute. There were still five days left.
With the remaining time, I made sure the visuals of the game were polished and thematic. Since the aesthetic was cyberspace, I made the levels look like a circuit board and the text windows look like command screens.
In the final couple of days, I had time to scratch the surface of the in-engine music tracker (of which I had next to no experience using). I spent a few hours with it to get a feel for how it can be used and what it can be used to do. Thinking back to the arcade influences for HA.X, I wanted to emulate arcade music and chose to write a brief A-part B-part track for the level music.
While there are a few bugs in the game, overall I’m incredibly happy and proud of the work I did in planning and developing HA.X. I certainly learned a lot during GB Jam 11, in large part due to remembering past lessons.
We’ll see what I do with HA.X in the future…
