Game development is a lot of fun. But finishing the game is very difficult and time-consuming. This is why game jams like Ludum Dare are great.
When you only have 48 hours to create a game completely from scratch, you will actually finish the game and it will be very rewarding.
You go through the complete process from idea through implementation to final product, including all aspects of game development such as coding, graphics, art, sounds, balancing, polishing, and more.
I haven’t finished the real game yet. But I finished all my eight jobs at Ludum Dare. Here are some tips and strategies for getting involved in the game jam that got me 18th out of 630 in the latest Ludum Dare.
1. Sleep
When you participate in a game jam like Ludum Dare, which only lasts 48 hours, you may be tempted to work all night and have very little or no sleep.
Do not do that!
Sleep is important. To work well, you need to rest well. Working at night while fighting fatigue won’t make much progress anyway.
Also, try to stick to your normal daily routine. Eat regularly, take breaks, and go outside for some fresh air. Fewer hours of focused work is better than more hours of unfocused distractions .
2. Idea
Consider your game idea before the event starts. Some game jams announce their topic ahead of time, giving you time to come up with a detailed plan. Others, like Ludum Dare, only announce the theme at the beginning of the event.
Even without knowing the topic, you can start thinking about some ideas ahead of time. Maybe you want to create a platformer? A strategy game? Or is there a new design pattern you want to experiment with?
In most cases, you can come up with a rough idea in advance and then adapt it to the theme when it is announced. If you only start collecting ideas after the event has already started, you will be wasting valuable time.
3. Plan
Even if you have collected some good ideas before the event starts, you should take some time at the beginning of the event to get your idea to the point and create a plan. Not only in your head. Write it down on a piece of paper or use a task scheduling program of your choice.
The plan should include all the basic game mechanics, as well as the most important graphics and sound resources that you will need. Also try to think about the order in which the tasks are completed to make sure you are doing them in a reasonable order. This will give you a rough structure to follow for the event.
However, if you have a few hours left and the plan didn’t work, or you have new ideas, just change the plan. There is no boss or customer forcing you to stick with your original idea. When you have the best one, just do it.
4. Scope of application
One of the toughest challenges in the game is swing. How do you choose an idea that can be implemented within 48 hours? Ultimately it all comes down to your ability and experience.
For your first game jam, pick the simplest idea you can imagine, the one you know for sure you can complete in the time allotted. In my first Ludum Dare, I literally created Snake. When you’re done early, you can always add more features. But due to the deadline, you cannot finish the game late, and submitting a half-finished game is not the best.
5. Time management
When you only have 48 hours to make a game completely from scratch, time management becomes the most important task. As mentioned above, you should always prioritize sleeping, eating, and going outside. But you still have 10 to 12 hours a day to work on the game. What is the best way to distribute hours?
If you’ve never made a game before, you might think that programming takes up most of your time; after all, it’s called game development . However, even for small games, programming takes less than 50% of your time, which is much less than for large AAA games.
For a 2 day event like Ludum Dare, my goal is to get the game play before the end of the first day. This includes all the basic game mechanics and at least the art of the programmer for everything. And since you’re probably not going to create extremely detailed and high-quality art assets for Ludum Dare games, these programming graphics may already be the final version.
This leaves a second day for all the other various tasks like sound effects, music, instructions, balancing and polishing, which add up quickly and take a long time.
Time is the most valuable commodity in game jams, photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash.
6. Music and sound effects
Music and sound effects are very important to the overall quality of your game. They have their own judging category in Ludum Dare, but they are much more important than that. They affect the overall experience of your game. Music and sounds convey a lot of emotion and atmosphere.
You don’t need to be the next Mozart to create enjoyable music for your playing; Of course not. There are many procedural music generators such as Wolfram Tones that can be used in even the stricter Compo Ludum Dare rules. With some experimentation, you can create beautiful background tracks in minutes.
It’s the same with sound effects. With bfxr or jfxr ( a JavaScript port of bfxr ) you can easily create procedural sound effects that are suitable for many situations but have some limitations. Your mouth has no limits, however, so when you can’t create a procedural sound effect, just put weird noises into your microphone and add some filters in Audacity . Works surprisingly well.
7. Instructions / manuals
Towards the end of the event, when you have implemented all the mechanics and finalized the graphics, try to create the best instructions possible. It doesn’t matter if you’ve made the perfect game if no one understands how to play it.
The best way to teach the player your mechanics is with an interactive tutorial that introduces your mechanics one by one and allows the player to try them out before continuing. However, online learning takes a decent amount of time that you may not have left for the final dash.
Another good alternative is a pop-up tutorial. When the game starts, show one or two screens that list the controls and explain the mechanism, ideally with screenshots next to them.
Always try to include instructions in the game itself. Many attendees only have instructions on the event website, which is inconvenient when you need to step back to check the instructions or read a multi-page novel before starting. Just add a few sentences from the text and a short list of instructions on the website, but there should always be instructions in the game.
8. Balancing
Balancing is the bane of any game developer’s existence. This can be more or less difficult depending on the game, but every game requires at least some of it.
You need to get the difficulty right so that the game is challenging for the player and can also be completed in ten minutes or so. And in such a big game jam like Ludum Dare, players of all skill levels participate: some may be gods of platforming, while others cannot jump even the slightest abyss. Just because of the difference in skill between players, it’s almost impossible to find a good balance.
You’ve also spent the last 48 hours building and thoroughly testing your game, so you’ve probably become pretty good at it, so it’s really hard for you to judge how a new player will live in your game. If you have the time and – much harder to find a game development nerd – friends, you should let them try an early version of your game, watch them work, and ask for their feedback.
9. Polishing
Adding more exciting features to the game is fun, much more fun than perfecting the game. But when the event draws to a close, you should still prioritize polishing.
Play your game a few times and write down any gross little things that are inconsistent or don’t improve your quality of life.
These are small fixes that will make your game shine. There is a simple hover effect, a little animation, additional instructions, additional information, a second sound effect for something that happens very often. The list goes on.
There is a saying in game development that is certainly true in game jams:
“A well-implemented idea is, on average, better than a great, poorly implemented one.”
And this requires polishing. At some point, you will have to be content with your idea. This was probably not an entirely new idea that would change the industry forever. And that’s okay. Just take your usual idea and make it shine.
10. Code quality
Even in a two-day game congestion, when you are in a rush to get things done on time, you should try to focus on good code quality, even if it cannot be maintained throughout the event. At some point you just want to hack something quick and dirty, and that’s okay. But first, you should try to write good code.
The longer you can maintain good quality, the easier it will be to add and modify items later. It happened to me many times that I didn’t implement something properly in the early stages, only to realize that I would need this particular feature later. So you can develop good habits and do your due diligence. This will probably only take a minute early on, but it can save 15 minutes later. Also, some game jams like Ludum Dare Compo require you to share your source code, so it’s always good to keep it clean.
Game jams are a great way to test your game development skills. For a limited time, you go through the entire process of creating a game, from idea to finished and published product.
There is no universal best way to create a jam game. These are some of the steps I use in Ludum Dare events and some of them may be helpful to you. But as always, the best advice: just try it yourself. Start with a very simple idea, and you will find that even completing a small and simple game is a very rewarding achievement. And after a few activities, you will find the steps that work best for you.
The great thing about game jams is that their location doesn’t matter. Some of your ideas will perform better than others, and you may get a higher or lower rating. But really, it’s all about getting other people to play your game and leave feedback in the comments that you can learn and improve.
