[Coda]

The biggest piece of advice I can give: Use what you know.

It takes a great deal of experience to truly understand one's own limits. For a first game jam, you should stick with the stuff you know how to do without having to spend mental effort on the "how" -- your hands will be quite full enough with the "what".

The tools don't even have to be designed for making games. Game-specific tools provide a lot of convenient features, but for a first jam the overhead of learning the tools during the time limit isn't likely to be worth it. Meanwhile, humans have been cobbling together games out of stuff not meant for games since time immemorial; the first video game was made with an oscilloscope.

The second piece of advice: Know thyself.

Your first game jam is likely going to be your first foray into managing a time-constrained project. If you're going to be successful, you need to hone your instincts about your own skill levels. Know what you're good at. Know what's too ambitious for you. Know how long it takes you to do things.

You will not be good at this.

Accept that fact right off the bat and it'll be easier. Project management is, in some ways, harder to get good at than programming, because it's a much softer skill with few visible signs of feedback along the way. So underestimate your ability, overestimate how long it'll take you to do things, and plan accordingly.

This of course ties back into the first piece of advice; since you only have a limited amount of time, you need to understand your competencies well enough to know what you have any hope of actually achieving.

Advice the third: Figure out what you're going to do.

This is the hardest part. There's a universe of possibilities out there, and you only have time to make one game. So before you ever write a single line of code, spend AT LEAST a full hour brainstorming ideas, then spend AT LEAST another full hour fleshing out your favorite idea or two. You can waive the brainstorming phase if a brilliant idea jumps out at you right off the bat, but don't skimp on the fleshing-out phase! If you jump in without a good plan, you'll find yourself spending too much time on things that feel important but then you'll find yourself with a few hours left to go with lots of code written but it's not a game.

Having a good plan means knowing what features you want to include, where you're going to find assets (what will you make yourself, what will you get from free game asset websites, etc.), and what order you're going to need to build the components in. Making this part of the plan might make you realize that you actually can't go with the idea you picked because you don't have the skills or the tools or the assets; you want to discover this early on instead of halfway through the jam.

An important part of this plan: Start small. Get something up and running quickly and then add in functionality piece by piece, with the most important parts coming first. That way if you find yourself running out of time, you can cut features and still be left with something that you can still call a game.

And the final point of advice: Don't be afraid to deviate from the plan.

Having the plan is super important, but the format of a game jam sometimes means compromises have to be made. It's all a matter of keeping your priorities in line: Your goal isn't to make the specific game you planned. Your goal is to make a game. This goal is even more important than keeping to the jam's theme; submitting a game that doesn't fit the theme is better than not submitting a game at all.

Keep your options flexible instead of getting too fixated on one specific concept. Especially for your first game jam, keep your eyes open for compromises that will simplify the work you have to do. Be ready to pivot into a different idea that can make use of the things you've built.

I've done five game jams so far and none of them have ended with the game that I had originally set out to make. My first one was supposed to be about a primitive people dealing with an alien invasion, and it ended up being about two tribes battling over a gem hoard.



In the end, finishing a game jam successfully can be really rewarding. You'll learn a lot about yourself and you'll develop skills that you might not have been pushed to hone otherwise.