Jeff On Games

This past weekend was the Boston Immigration Game Jam, and like previous Jams, I'm going to do a quick post mortem about my experiences, not only because I think it will help others, but because it will help me as I prepare for my next game jam. For this Jam I was in a team of 5 on day one, which included 3 musicians, which later went down to 4 when two of the musicians decided to not show up for day 2 and one new programmer joined the team.

The game we ended up making was called "Cultural Exchange" and was supposed to be about managing a country, trying to attract the "right" sort of people while keeping out undesirables. To do this, you would enact legislation to make your country more appealing to some people, and erect fences and the like to keep out undesirables. However, people in the country wouldn't like things being too restrictive, since they value their freedom, so it was a constant balancing act.

Now I know normally I start with what went right at the jam, but this time I feel what went wrong is more important. So here we go:

What Went Wrong

1. Not having a clear idea: While the description is fairly clear, neither me nor Kevin had any idea how we were going to get it working. We didn't actually get anything designed until very late in the night, and even that was just kind of border-line. Since we didn't have a clear idea about how the game would play, we had no idea what our restrictions were.
2. Using Flixel: Now, no offense to Flixel, but I was not impressed with my first outing with it. This is partially linked to not having a clear idea of what we wanted to do, and not having a clear understanding of the limitations of Flixel. I spent 90% of the first day fighting with ActionScript and Flixel, not only because I didn't understand Flixel's limitations, but because Flixel has some issues with transparency, some of which it inherits from Flash. I spent at least 3 hours trying to move some buttons off screen, only to throw up my hands in frustration. In addition, we were using FlashDevelop, which does not have a debugger included for Flash, which made dealing with all the problems that much worse.

   I took 3 learning points out of my Flixel experience, which don't actually relate to Flixel at all:

   1. Always use something you're familiar with for a game jam, even if it's not the best tool for the job.
   2. Constrain your idea to what you know is possible in the tool you're working with.
   3. Do not take platform into account. If you really like your game after the game jam, you can always port it to a different platform.
3. Too big a scope: Out game had way to big a scope for our time frame. There was just no way it was getting done.

What Went Right

1. Switching to AngelXNA: At about 10 on Saturday, I switched all of our code from ActionScript to C#, and all of our Flixel code to AngelXNA. I was too pissed with Flixel's limitations to deal with learning how to get around them, whereas I knew the limitations of Angel really really well, and I could get around them very quickly (see point 3a). Even though this meant losing a programmer on the project, it still ended up well (see the next point).If nothing else, Angel, I've realized, is EXTREMELY transparent. I find pretty much everything does what you'd expect. That said, getting started up in Angel is hard, and I do need to do some tutorials for it in the near future.
2. Having a dedicated designer: The second day, Kevin ended up doing only design. This was the ONLY way we actually were able to finish at all. Kevin ran through turns on paper, and looked into how legislations would affect the population on each turn. Looking back at other Jams, I think we could have done better if we'd had someone we dedicated as "designer" to look into these problems earlier, rather than playing it by ear the whole time.

Generally this was a short Jam, and I went into it already tired, so I wasn't super psyched about it. But I think I learned a little bit more about jamming, and some things I really want to add to Angel for the next jam, so keep an eye out for that.