Escaping Tutorial Hell With My First Game Jam
Deadlines, shitty menus, and a locked closet were the path forward
I want to make games. For fun, and if I'm being honest, for money too. Reading advice on this topic there seem to be two schools of thought:
- Just start
- Buy my course/Watch my 10 hour YouTube playlist
Neither worked for me. For years my Godot launcher was a graveyard of half finished projects — abandoned tutorials or ideas with half backed mechanics, no menus, or sound. And once a year I would get the itch, open Godot, delete the files, and start again.
To break this cycle I have decided to enter 4 game jams by the end of this year.
Game Jams are community events where a theme is revealed and you have a strict time window to make and submit a game. They are constantly running on Itch.io.
So I entered my first Game Jam. You can find it here. And I made a game. You can find it here
Why did forcing myself into a jam work when everything else failed?
1. The Deadline(And Parkinsons Law)
"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" — Parkinsons Law
Give me an email to write and a day to do it and I will ruin that day agonising over phrasing and imagining all the ways it could be mis-interpreted before hitting send two minutes before it’s due. Game development is no different.
Without a deadline, finishing a game this month turns into this year, turns into never.
A deadline made me do the unglamorous work I never get around too:
- Creating main menus
- Configuring export settings and screen resolutions
- Downloading build managers and figuring out how to upload to itch.io
My menus were ugly. The settings clumsy. But for the first time, they existed. Without that impeding deadline I would of closed Godot and booted up Steam the moment I had to think about window scaling.
2. The Theme Helps Decision Paralysis
The advice 'go make a game' didn't work for me because it was too broad. Immediately my monkey mind starts up,
“What type of game? An incremental game? You don’t know how to code that. What about platformer? Physics are hard. A farming sim? You can't draw art” — My Monkey Mind
The endless list of things I don’t know beats me down until I close Godot.
A theme constrains this. Instead if the prompt is "the theme is rain — go make a retro platformer", the vast void of my incompetence reduces to a manageable checklist.
I can finally pat the little monkey on the head and say, "I don’t know how to create a rain drop overlay yet but I can learn." Then feed it a banana and lock it in a closet so I can get to work.
3. Learning To Fail Publicly
Stand up comedians always say that getting comfortable bombing on stage is the fastest way to becoming a good comic. Once the worst case scenario has happened and you survive, you are less afraid.
Publishing a game with basic graphics, missing sound effects, and zero polish was intimidating. But it's not unheard of in game jams. I wasn't alone.
4. Feedback & Encouragement
After submitting, a few people played the game and left comments. All of them have been nice. Words to inflate my anxious soul wracked with thoughts of the world ending because my end of credits scene looked like a draft.
Critique from experienced devs is rare and valuable too and any method that promotes it is one I want to use.
But for now simple validation that a game was fun for two minutes is enough fuel to keep me going. It was only my first game after all.