First Game Jam

So you're joining your first jam. Where do you start? Well I am doing just that and I hope to help you get started and give you my experience in what I did right, what I would do next time, and resources that you can use too.

First, I need a jam to join, obviously. There are hundreds going on every day and tons of genres to choose from. I chose a beginners jam from https://itch.io/jams. The jam I chose is 1 week long, let me use any engine or credited assets as long as it was a playable game and an optional "sneaky" theme. You can check out Creators without Borders at https://csfrontieres.itch.io/ to see what other beginner friendly jams they are hosting.

I created a design document to help plan out what I was going to create and you can use it too.

Level Design Template.pdf

Download PDF • 13KB

With the sneaky theme in mind, I immediately thought of a pantomime animation I had created in school. It was of a little girl sneaking a cookie off of a baking tray and I decided to create a simple game around that. It was going to be a top down game with a simple high score system. You would have to collect treats that were left around for the incoming guests arriving for a dinner party. Don't get caught sneaking treats or it's game over. As time went on, more guests would show up and make it more difficult to sneak around adding some challenge. I quickly drew up a map to work out multiple paths the player could take to avoid detection.

With a week time limit, I wanted to use assets from the marketplace to create my top down home environment and I made sure to mark down what asset packs I used to add to the credits. I popped those into Unreal and got to work on my block in. Since I was using assets I got from the Unreal marketplace, I just blocked out the rooms and some major furniture so I could test out the Navmesh and make sure my AI could walk around. Next I worked on the enemy AI and spawning system. I started setting up my main character and the treat collectables and connecting that to a simple UI. The blueprints took up most of the time that I had as it's what I struggle with the most. After that, I started to set up the Main title screen and pretty soon I had a working game.

With the deadline drawing near, I didn't get to achieve everything I wanted to. I threw in a few more last minute assets to fill up the place and started to package my game. I zipped it up and got ready to upload it when I ran into a huge problem, the file size limit. I had gone way over what I could upload to the site and I had to go back into the project and figure something out. There was hundreds of unused files taking up space from all the asset packs I uploaded. I went through the whole thing and deleted what I needed to, packaged it again, and uploaded my game submission.

I had finally completed my first jam and felt a huge sense of accomplishment. I definitely made some mistakes along the way and there's a few bugs to work out but it's a start to lifelong dream. I met some great artists and programmers in their discord and I cannot wait to join the next jam and create more games. If you are interested in checking out my first ever published game you can go to https://allioops.itch.io/candy-stash and let me know your high score!

Happy gaming!