Game Jam Breakdown - Pocket Jam Bloom

Let's break down a game jam experience!

A few weeks ago I, along with several other Finnish game developers, partook in the Finnish Game Jam Pocket Jam 7 hosted as a part of PGConnects Helsinki. This was my first in-person jam, and the only person I knew at the event was someone that I had only met a few weeks ago at IGDA Finland's monthly Helsinki meetup.

Game jams are quite simple in concept: you have a set amount of time to make a new video game from scratch, usually based on a theme that is revealed at the start of the jam. They usually vary from 2 days to 2 weeks in length, making Pocket Jam's 30 hour time limit a unique challenge that demands scoping even smaller than usual.

The event began with a quick round of introductions and everyone getting to know each other. Soon after, the theme was revealed: bloom. Immediately various groups went into pitching mode, trying to attract as many of the other jammers onto their project as possible with a clever idea and a set of intriguing features. 15 minutes was allotted to this scramble, and at the end of it, it was time to present. Behold, a Game Design Document:
shorturl.at/kouTU

The pitch idea was simple: scope small, match the theme, create tasks for all game development disciples. Since this was also for an event hosted as a part of a mobile gaming convention, the game should target mobile platforms and have an instantly understandable primary gameplay loop to lure in people that may only have a few minutes to ogle at a curiosity as they pass by. Of course this diminished scope wouldn't be the biggest seller for enticing other jammers to join the team, but I had confidence in how I'd present it and letting the document speak for itself in its simplicity.

Sure enough, there was interest in the project. The first member to join was our lead programmer Jaakko Sirén, the man responsible for 95% of all the code in the entire project. Soon after Pavla Oubret joined in as our lead writer, an unusual position for a game jam to be sure, but one that provided the project its identity and personality. And finally lead composer Ali Hosseini agreed to compose our soundtrack as well as to create sound effects for the various actions the player could take. This left me with level and gameplay design, production, and miscellaneous minor tasks that come up during development. As we didn't have a dedicated artist, Pavla and I agreed to split asset generation between the two of us.

And it was off to the races! The bulk of the jam was spent on actually building the game, with our programmer typing code ceaselessly, our writer conjuring a story of a post-apocalyptic zombie bee revitalizing nature, our composer making one banger of a main tune while also working with another team on their audio, and myself trying to keep it all together. The biggest help in that was the GDD written soon after the pitch - everything was organized neatly using the MoSCoW prioritization method. The idea behind "must have, should have, could have, won't have" is to simply break tasks into small chunks ordered by how important they are to making the finished product actually work. This is a natural fit for short deadlines like the ones you see at game jams, and it has served me well for years now.

There were a few unique challenges along the way. For one, I have next to no musical talent of my own, so communicating a clear vision of what the game should sound like to our composer was initially quite daunting. Luckily Ali is a professional that knew what questions to ask to prod the answers that he needed out of me, and the end result fits the mood, aesthetic, and gameplay pace excellently. This has definitely opened my eyes to everything that goes on behind the scenes when making a musical track fit a product, and I'll definitely remember these pointers the next time that I'm working with audio.

The second challenge came with art. Now I'm no stranger to pixel art, and I've made a few animated characters in the past, but Zombee Gardening's aesthetic was quite distinct from what I'm used to. Flowers, greenery, and a cute mascot are clearly outside my comfort zone, and to top it all of I needed to make sure my art would match with Pavla's assets. After some digging and a few horrible looking pixel daisies, I settled on looking at a classic for inspiration: Yoshi's Island for the Super Nintendo. The thick outlines and bright colors were a perfect fit for what I had envisioned. By making all of our assets out of simple shapes with flat coloring, we could also generate everything in grayscale and color it in engine, adding color variety without requiring additional art from our thinly stretched team.

Thirdly, level design. While the game is a super casual mobile game, I wanted to include a degree of challenge to make Zombee Gardening from a toy to a game. Since the story had to be written in parallel while I was still working on levels, we had to settle on a level count early on. With two core interactions in fully detonating flowers and in the special one-petal throwers in play, we agreed on 10 levels: one for the tutorial, four for burst, four for one-petal throwers, and one for a grand finale that lets the player go wild with tapping and particle effects. The number 4 per mechanic was not chosen randomly: it is a perfect number for the level flow of "introduce, expand, master, twist." By letting the player first learn a mechanic in a contained space, then expanding the idea into a larger level, then requiring skilled use, and finally adding a twist you can wring out maximum enjoyment from one mechanic in the smallest space possible. Of course this formula either necessitates a ton of mechanics or a very short game, but since our target demographic was "people with 5 minutes to spare", this was perfect for our purposes.

Ultimately I am quite happy with how Explosive Zombee Gardening turned out. The game is fully playable from start to finish with no missing features, the audio and particle effects blend into graphics to make the game feel tactile, and with the exception of one misplaced flower near the mid-game all the levels flow as planned. The judges also seemed to recognize this too, leading to the game being initially tied for winning the "best jam game" contest before just barely finishing second against Akorn. The jam itself was quite fun too, and I met tons of new people that I hope to work with again in the future. If you're curious about game jamming but have been on the edge about joining, I'd highly recommend it. It's frantic, it's fun, and you learn a ton by doing it! And every now and then, you come up with an idea worth expanding into a full release after the fact.