GMTK 2023 was my first game jam, and what a wonderful first jam it’s been. I’ve met a lot of new, awesome people and discovered lots of super innovative concepts and ideas. I’m very excited to continue my journey into the game design world, and experiment with all kinds of different games. I’d like to take a moment here to reflect on this jam and talk about everything I did and what I could do better in future jams.

My overall rating this jam was 3.05 stars, placing me in 2609th place out of 6738 games. This rating was made up of the following three components:

• Enjoyment: My enjoyment rating was 2.8 stars, placing me in 2700th place. Enjoyment for this game seemed to vary wildly, which makes sense as it wasn’t something I focused on as much as I should have. I didn’t really playtest this game very much myself, instead preferring to rely on others for playtesting. All of my playtesters, being either experienced jammers or people who had experience with weird art of mine, liked the game, since that was the audience I had aimed at. But I failed to account for the very prevalent crowd of people with less experience with weird art or game jams, or gamers who didn’t speak english as their first language. Because of this, the game was, according to player feedback, very unintuitive to many people. In fact, confusion was probably my most common complaint. There was also a significant bug that forced players to click “won” before the timer ran out. I noticed this bug the evening before the jam ended, and thought I had implemented a fix, but as it turned out, my fix actually didn’t work at all.
  
  • Potential Solutions: In the future, I will endeavor to get feedback from a wider range of people with a broader range of experience. I will reach out to first-time jammers who have dropped out or those who don’t speak english fluently and ask them to test my game, so that I can get more feedback as to what’s unclear before the jam ends. I will also endeavor to include more visual aids for those who don’t speak english fluently to help them understand what to do in the game. Lastly, I will do better when bugfixing, and make sure I test my own game more in general to make sure it actually works and plays well.
• Creativity: Creativity was the highest ranking I got, with 3.9 stars, placing me in 640th place. Many comments lauded my creativity in making this game, and I’m honestly quite surprised that it isn’t higher, even though it’s still quite high. I suspect my creativity ranking was affected by the frustrations of the aforementioned people who didn’t understand the game ragequitting and rating the game lower than they otherwise would have, but there may be other explanations. I’d be interested if anyone who reads this has another possible explanation for rating this game lower in creativity than 4 stars.
  
  • Potential Solutions: Again, I think clearer explanations are the way to go. If the game’s concept isn’t clear, the creativity ranking won’t be as high as it should. Unfortunately, as I’m still not sure what was unclear about my explanations, I think the best answer is again visual aids, to add another dimension to the explanation and ensure that non-native english speakers can understand it.
• Presentation: Presentation was by far my worst rating, with 2.45 stars, putting me in 4217th place. There’s a lot to be improved here. First, I expected people to count humor as part of my presentation rating, but it obviously seems to me like many didn’t, putting those points into enjoyment instead, if at all. My actual presentation was quite limited by my game engine, with a deeply annoying engine bug that forced me to leave background CSS off of any page which updated past its initial loading (basically, every combat and exploration page, and the starting page after the content note). The stick figure that represented the player was messy, and I didn’t test it enough to ensure it stayed readable after losing several limbs. It was absolutely spaghetti code, and one important improvement to make if I ever make a post-jam version of this game is to replace the parts of it with actual art, instead of “a bunch of   followed by a / or | or \.” I very much underestimated the impact of music on people’s ratings. It was probably my most mentioned piece of feedback after general unintuitiveness. Music is also quite difficult to incorporate into twine, and though I admit I wasn’t looking that hard, I didn’t find the resources to do it until after the jam. I did include some art - outside of the game, there was a detailed character drawing on the game icon, and Black Knight helmets surrounding the game interface. However, not everyone looked at that, or counted it towards their ranking.
  • Potential Solutions:  As I mentioned, there’s a lot to be improved here. In terms of music, I need to ensure that I know how to do music and practice with it before the jam begins, in whatever engine I’m using. I also need to figure out how I’m doing music, and whether it’s with a free sound library or my own voice. Essentially I just need to plan to include it, since it’s quite important. Art is also probably more important than I gave it credit for, and though I did include some, it might have been nice to include art signifying each enemy in each fight, as well as the visual aids that I’ve mentioned already. In the future, I need to improve my speed-drawing so that I can create decent-quality art faster for the games I’m making, and also just make art a higher priority. In general, it’s important for me to remember that presentation matters just as much as the other two ratings in this jam. Polish is very important.

I would also rate myself on these two categories:

• Marketing: Though not an official category, marketing is a big part of making games. I managed to get a total of 76 ratings in this jam, putting me in the 96th percentile and making my game one of the most rated. I did this primarily by doing a lot of rate swaps via the Post Jam Productions server, but I also had a high-quality thumbnail which attracted a lot of players. Releasing the game almost 24 hours ahead of time was almost certainly also a factor, and I got a good chunk of plays before the jam even started. However, doing all of this marketing exhausted me, and by the third or fourth day of the review period, I stopped most of my marketing at around 65 ratings. The other 11 came from the small bit of marketing I did afterwards, I suppose. My primary question is, was all of that marketing actually a good idea? My game was very much aimed at a niche audience, meaning that getting lots of ratings from the general public was probably bad for my overall score. I might have done better if I had only marketed towards a niche audience, perhaps by advertising only to people I spoke with instead of doing rate swaps with random people. Ultimately, I think this depends on a couple of factors:
  • First, do I want to win, or do I want to get the best feedback possible? In this case, it was a mix of both, but getting better feedback was probably better for my long-term growth as a designer. If I want to win, it’s probably best to market a bit less, but if I want to get more feedback, I want as many people playing as possible.
  • Second, how niche does my game wind up being? In this case, it was quite niche. If it’s designed for the broader game jam community, there’s no reason for me not to market it, but more niche games should make me really consider my goals for the jam.
• Healthy Living: I would give myself 5 stars on this. I did not turn myself into a zombie over this game jam, something which I’m very happy about. Honestly, my focus was not the greatest during the jam time, but that was in part because my scope was very small and so once I finished it I relaxed maybe more than I should have. I did manage to get a good amount of sleep both nights during the jam, and I ate meals at reasonable times. This is a category which I hope to keep steady in future game jams while I improve in other categories, haha.

Takeaways:

• Polish is very important to game jams. I need to focus on it much more than I did
  
  • In particular, art and music are very significant to people’s enjoyment of the game.
    • I need to learn to draw faster and figure out how to make music for games in general (though the only instrument I’m trained with is my voice).
  • Adding juice should also be an important part of my creative process. The game should feel reactive to the player’s inputs.
• Game jam audiences are very broad, and I need to appeal to everyone. Common creative wisdom says that making something controversial is better than making something everyone will think is decent, but I don’t think that’s true given the rating system.
  • What this means is, I need to think about what my goals are for any given jam and make choices based off of that, and how much I care about the rating system.
• Playtesting is important, but it’s most important to get a wide variety of playtesters rather than do a lot of playtesting.
  • QA is also important, and something I need to do more myself during jams.

Overall, this was a good concept executed sort of poorly. In the future, I hope to improve my execution in a variety of ways, as well as keep my audience in mind more when I brainstorm game concepts.