Richard Fleming

So I did the Indie Speed Rune (ISR) (www.indiespeedrun.com) with my two sons, ages 5 and 7, last week.  Fun experience of course, but picked up a few production lessons from it.  Because while we did technically finish, it was bad.  Technical and social issues forced an 11th hour rewrite, and I redesigned and created the entire game as it was submitted in about one hour.  The only thing I was able to salvage was some of the artwork and the very high-level concept.  I hit the upload button with literally 30 seconds to spare, and what was uploaded has a critical bug:  It’s almost impossible to die.  In fact if you just let the game run and do nothing, you never will.  I have cleaned it up a bit, added in a high score (which only works for that game session) and uploaded it to my staff page:  http://staff.jccc.edu/rflemin1/12games/january/

The ISR gave all teams two randomized bits, a theme and an element.  In our case the theme was Afterlife and the element was Message in a Bottle.  For what we turned in, you are dead, and have been entertaining yourself by writing messages and floating them down the River of Souls in bottles.  The Grim Reaper has finally had enough, and sent his ghost skulls after you.  You need to toss your bottles at the skulls to drive them away.  And that core does work, mostly.  Just have to ignore the impossible to lose bug I mentioned earlier.

What Went Right:

Fun:
This was a fun project that my sons and I greatly enjoyed doing.  They are very proud of the game they helped to make and enjoyed themselves while working on it.  I have a very thick stack of artwork they generated during the jam, most of which I didn’t get to use, sadly.  But the main point here is that since we were having fun, and not overly worried about impressing anyone else, the work went very smooth.

Design:
Despite their young age, or perhaps because of it, working together to figure out the general story and game mechanics worked really well.  They didn’t deal very will with the highly abstract concept of ‘Afterlife’, all that meant to them was undead or heaven.  Figured undead would be the least controversial  option.  Some of the ideas and mechanics they came up with were rather…random, but in some aspects that worked really well.  I can remember at one point one suggested we have a dragon, the other then jumped on that idea and said it could be a dragon of souls, then back to the first who said the dragon had to be a good guy because dragons deserved to be good too, and I suggested the dragon of souls saved the character from being pulled into the river, and that was the starting point for the story.  There were several other instances where we rifted off each other’s ideas really well.  I firmly belive the final concept we came up with is much more imaginative than what I would have done by myself.

Division of Labor:
Having them work on art while I wrestled with the code and technical aspects worked really well.  Not to mention they got to learn about scanning in documents to a computer, transferring file, and using GIMP to do basic image manipulation.  At the end of the jam I had a flash drive filled with artwork, which is what enabled me to survive the emergency panic redesign.

What Went Wrong:

Scope Control:
I know about this.  I tell my students to watch for this, warn my Global Game Jam participants about this, and I still screwed this up.  The final design idea called for randomly generated levels based on which runes are used to write a message, which you then had to explore and find other runes that you could use.  Of course the levels had to have different enemy types, and there was this epic battle planned against Death and….ya.  Too much.  Trust me I scaled things back, nixed some of their more exuberant ideas, but still didn’t do it enough.  It can be really hard to properly scope something.  Even harder when you’re other two teammates have no idea how much work some things are.  Had I scoped things down to something I felt could be done in several hours and just focused on that, things would have gone much better.

Overestimating your Team/Communication:
Theses two are really intertwined in this case.  For the overestimating issue, I had a 5 and 7 year-old working with me.  There’s a limit in both how well they can focus on a single task and while I had taken that into consideration, I still overestimated a little a bit in this area.  The biggest issue that I ran into was their lack of abstract thinking.  Children that young just don’t do well with abstracts.  My oldest can handle it better, but a 5 year old really struggles with extremely abstract things.  So when I told him to “Go draw some runes” he really struggled with it, and didn’t really produce anything usable.  Compounding this was a lack of communication.  Looking back, I realize I didn’t communicate to them from the start the whole process for getting the art into the game, so several pictures were unusable.  I then had to stop what I was doing, point out the mistake, and send them back to try again.  I also failed to realize that my domain knowledge isn’t their domain knowledge.  I’ve been gaming for a long time, “mystic runes” has been a part of RPG’s since…forever.  Especially since I’ve played all the Ultima series, and read books on actual runes, I know quite a bit about them and can come up with rune designs very easily.  For some reason I though it was sufficient to show my kids a google image search on runes and say “Draw something like that” with no further instruction.

Real Life Compensation:
Real life marches on, regardless of jams.  I had to fix breakfast  lunch and dinner.  I had to let them go when my wife came home so they could work on their Chinese.  They had to have their evening reading time.  While I knew these things were going to happen, I didn’t really think about how much time is spent on them.  I lost at least 8-9 hours on these items, which really hurt.  But the biggest is that my wife teaches at the Greater KC Chinese School, and she had some lesson stuff that had to get done on the second night of the jam.  Only one computer in our house can handle typing up Chinese documents, my main dev machine.  So I got kicked off.  I tried to transfer the project to my laptop, but something went wrong.  I discovered after about an hour of work that the project couldn’t save.  My wife was still working, so I last the entire night.  Oh and I still had to help her in the morning with a few things, which further ate into the time.

Start Time:
The ISR is a little unique, in that teams got to decide when to start the jam.  Once you hit the Go button, you had 48 hours from that moment.  Now in the Global Game Jame, it starts and ends at 5PM.  This means the final stretch of 8-10 hours (depending on when you get up) is during normal waking hours.  I started the ISR at 9AM, which meant the final 12 hours of the ISR was during normal sleeping hours.  Oops.  That was not a good choice.

Final Thoughts:

Had a lot of fun, but things could have went a lot better.  Always keep a close eye on scope, be sure you have a good handle on your team’s capabilities, and make sure you schedule in enough Muphy Law time.  Now to rest up and get ready for the Global Game Jam.