GAME JAM

Last week I had my first game jam where a bunch of us were required to make an idea for a video game, we grouped up a couple of times and then in the end had a one final group where we tried to solidify our individual group ideas.

I quite enjoyed it but I felt like a lot of us went a little lost in the basic objective of the task. I especially felt like people had ideas that were either too complex or too basic. But that’s probably just me.

The whole game jam in a sense felt like that metaphor of how Christians just throw their baby in the water and expect them to learn to swim on their own.

I particularly felt like the biggest flaw with our group was that after a while it felt like one person was doing all the work. We all tried to contribute but it still felt like an idea that was ripped off from a pre-existing game to fit a brief.

I felt like we had a pretty decent system set in place, Denis could work on the art, Gourav would research on other similar games and some other things that could help with the context of the game, and I wanted to work on the story of the game. And Keenan (might be spelling his name wrong), could overlook everything because it was his base idea.

Things weren’t exactly smooth but I think it’s fair for me to blame it on the timeframe, and all things considered, I actually think we came out the other end with a pretty decent game idea, and it did do its job. No reason to beat ourselves up for any of this honestly.

There was also the other thing that I quite liked, a game jam based on an internet talk/book I saw when I was in India, “reality is broken”. The basic concept behind it is that games are pieces of art that can contribute to the development of culture, and its our jobs as designers to think about the impact we want our games to have.

I think that there’s still a lot of room for improvement for me over there, to have to continuously ask the question “How is this contributing to the core”, in the same way I used to ask the same question when I reflected on individual scenes of my film in my thesis projects in my undergrad.

DAY 1

Today there were a bunch of lectures and I still need to do a bunch of reflecting on this, still haven’t processed everything that was said. A thought that keeps lingering in my head is that 1/9 of people in the UK get hired for a game role. This reminds me of how Exurbia used to complain about how every art class begins with the “you probably won’t get hired” lecture, and one should ignore such comments and simply work on oneself. Everyone has the capacity to be great. And even if I don’t get a game role, I might be just as happy working another role as long as I’m involved in ‘making stuff’.

Having talked to a bunch of people, I’m also realising I’m severely under-experienced in the industry. I need to learn the engines and coding and pipelines and I need to work in the way that people in the industry do : grind.

I’ve already started a 3-hour course on unreal engine on LinkedIn learning, and it is helping me quite a bit. I’m going through the “unreal vs unity” debate in my head as well, a conversation I hope to bring up with one of my faculties individually at some point. I know it for a fact that my biggest weakness, besides the under-experienced part, is not being able to code.

I need to learn how to code properly as well, and I’m definitely going to sign up for coding lectures on the timetable as soon as I get some recommendations from my faculties.

I came to Falmouth with very few expectations. Whenever someone asks me “So what do you do? level design? systems design?” I go completely blank. In my head, this is all completely new. It’s fairly intimidating. I was hoping that I could take my own time and figure out what everything means and the nuances and what works for me. but I think the deadline is pulling in closer now. I think I need to start getting the hang of things, I need to get back to my creative practice, take photographs everyday, and think about game design in the everyday little things I do. I need to start noticing little things like I used to. I need to start learning the way I used to before I got into a 1-year burnout phase. I don’t like to call it a grind because that’s not the way it works, but I still need to start taking this much more seriously. step by step I am doing exactly that, but I think that a month from now I’m going to be in a completely different level of seriousness than I am now. Right now, for the most part, I’ve just been trying to focus on getting used to a new place. And now that that’s mostly done, I can start taking my practice more seriously.

Arts

On a different note, I quite enjoyed reading this book I found in the Falmouth public library, “Games as Arts”, which introduced me to a lot of studios that I didn’t know about before that focus slightly more on the artistic side of games. I particularly like this studio called “State of Play Games”, and found the art styles extremely beautiful. 

I think there’s a lot of things similar between the movie industry and the games industry too, and continuously comparing them helps.