So, I said at the end of my last post that I ought to play and rate the other entries in the two game jams I’d recently participated in, and I… didn’t do that as soon or as much as I should have. It was a busy time; the spring semester just started the day after the Mini Jam finished, and I… wasn’t as prepared as I should have been for the classes I’m teaching, so I had a lot of work to do. Still, I figured I ought to get around to it at some point, and eventually I did… partly.
By the time I finally made time to play and rate other entries, I found that the deadline for rating games in the Mini Jam had already passed… but there was still time to rate the games in the Discord Jam. So I did. Not all of them, of course, but as many as I could. Which, unfortunately, turned out to be not all that many; I only rated about 10% of the entries, but I guess at least that’s something. I’ll try to do better next time. For want of a better system, I decided to rate the games that had received the fewest ratings so far… fortunately, itch.io supplied just such a list, so that was easy.
Anyway, Mini Jam 72 approacheth, and I want to participate in that, so I figured before that starts I should try to at least make a quick post about the other entries in the game jams, at least those that I rated. I’m not going to post about every game that I played, partly because some of them… were really not good, and I don’t want to lambaste other game creators. Instead, I’m just going to write about some general trends that I saw, although of course my sample size was very small so I don’t know how well those trends hold up overall. And I’m going to write about some lessons I’m going to take away for my own future game jam participation.
In the cases of two of the games that I played, I can se why they had received so few ratings. One (“The Lab: Mutations“) required the player to install the Quest text adventure platform; another (“revived“) the RPG Maker XP Runtime Package. Without commenting on the quality of the games themselves (both of which I did play), yeah, I’d think making people download and install external resources in order to play your game could cut down on your playerbase. (To be fair, the maker of the former game did provide a way to play it online without installing Quest, but said that it could be “a bit laggy” and was “not recommended”.)
(Also, a number of the Unity games I tried playing didn’t work at all on my laptop—they crashed out almost immediately with a weird error: “The procedure entry point CheckIsMSIXPackage could not be located in the dynamic link library C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\OPENGL32.dll” However, it seems from the comments other people were able to run these games just fine, and I got them all working on my desktop, so this may be an issue with my laptop rather than with the games themselves—I’ve been experiencing other issues with my laptop and have been meaning to refresh the Windows installation anyway.)
Anyway, all of the games that I played were 2D. (Well, except the text adventure, I guess, which didn’t really have a D at all in this sense.) Again, these represented a very small sample size, and I’m sure there were 3D entries other than mine, but maybe 3D entries to game jams are… less common that I’d assumed? Also, they were much shorter than I expected. For the limited time of a game jam, that’s understandable, of course; there’s only so much you can do in a few days; but… I’d been worried my game was too short, but maybe I’d actually been a little too ambitious.
Several of the games I played had the same control scheme: WASD to move, mouse to aim and fire. I don’t play a lot of shooters; is this a common control scheme? Because I found it immensely frustrating. Maybe it is a common control scheme for shooters, and maybe it feels more natural with more practice, but I haven’t had a lot of practice with this control scheme, and I couldn’t get it to work. So yeah… I’m afraid I didn’t get very far on those games. Some of the games I played, I completed, but not those. (And at least one of the games I tried I have no idea how to play. The instructions were minimal and not helpful; I have absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do. I’d probably feel worse about that if it weren’t that from the comments on the game’s page, it seems I wasn’t the only one with this issue.)
Also, platformers were disproportionately represented in the games I played. Once again, small sample size, maybe this was a coincidence, but yeah, I’d say the two best of the games I played were both platformers. Then again, so was one of the worst, so this doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any correlation between genre and quality.
I felt a little bad rating the games, actually, because I’m no game expert; who am I to presume to give ratings? But then again, people want the games to be rated, so I did my best. I hope my ratings weren’t too reflective of my own preconceptions and perhaps unfamiliarity with some of the conventions used.
Anyway, takeaways for my own future jam participation? Well, I’d say maybe I should be less ambitious, but honestly I’m not doing these for the prizes, and don’t care that much how I place; I’m doing it mostly just for the practice and fun of game creation. (I can’t honestly say I don’t care at all how I place, of course; I did check out of curiosity how “Pieces” placed in Mini Jam 71, which was badly, and while that’s not surprising—I am fairly new to game creation, after all, and I know I don’t really know what I’m doing—I can’t deny it did sting a little. But again, I’m doing this mostly just to get more experience with game creation, so I’m going to keep trying anyway.) So, honestly, I’m going to continue to try to make 3D games because that’s what I’m currently trying to get practice doing, and… okay, maybe I’ll scale my ambitious down a little, but probably not as much as I should.
But one big takeaway is that I need to put a higher priority on presentation. For “Pieces”, I left things like music and title screens and the like till the end, and then didn’t end up getting time to do them—so the final game didn’t have any of that. But those things are important; almost all the entries I played had some sort of music and sound effects, and some kind of title screen, and it really does make a difference. It probably would have been better to leave out a few of the puzzles or locations I implemented in “Pieces” if it meant I’d have had time to put in some sound and titles, and next time I’ll prioritize accordingly.
Also, I probably should have made it more obvious upfront how the game was supposed to be played. The adventure game aspect of “Pieces” wasn’t necessarily obvious at the start; none of the objects the player could pick up were particularly close to the starting location—and there were no instructions about using the inventory. Next time I ought to make sure the basis of the game is clear early on, and maybe even include a bit of a tutorial if warranted.
And speaking of next time, Mini Jam 72 starts in less than ten minutes, so I should finish up and post this so I can then be ready to find out what the limitation is and start on that. But anyway, if you want to try out these games yourself, you can play the entries to Discord Jam 5 here, and you can play the entries to Mini Jam 71 here.
