Game Jam Reflective Report

It's safe to say when I first heard about the Game Jam at the start of the semester I was interested in applying and taking part in it. It is something I have never done before and was going to be a whole new experience for me. When I was at my peak in gaming it was around the time of the PS2's first launch. I'm not someone who would game online or even game much with other people so the idea of creating a game with a group of people I didn't know was scary but exciting. It's safe to say I did enjoy the weekend as a whole and it was a lot more enjoyable then I originally thought it was going to be. Over the weekend there was up's and downs but in the end I was delighted with the game my team created was happy with the overall experience of Game Jam.

The format is really interesting. Forming groups from different courses within TU Dublin. These included CDM, Business and Language and finally the Game Design course in Grangegorman. Oh how I prayed to get a student from the Game Design course... spoiler, I didn't. I applied and on the day was allocated three other teammates and together we would come up with a concept for a game and then create it to the best of our ability. We had 3 days (Friday- Sunday) to complete our game and upload it to itch.io. Together as a team we were to create a language based game with the help from the language students on the team. After these games were completed and uploaded it was time to vote! As of writing this post we have not yet found out the results but there were some truly amazing games uploaded. The standard was so high.

The team I was allocated was Team Firebird! This was a very cool name and I immediately thought I was off to a good start. My team consisted of 2 language students whom studied Spanish, a fellow CDM and also a close friend and myself. We joined the teams chat and got the lowdown of the weekend from the different lecturers and organisers as well as past winner Evan Williams. We then were put into our Teams chat and put to work. Straight away there was a. friendly welcoming atmosphere with my team. A big worry I had was that there would be little conversation and input from people that I did not know from other courses. This fear was quickly put away when both the Language students (Jack and Rachel) were very chatty and seemed happy to be there. After introductions we got to work and the roles within the group were discussed. We decided that as we didn't have a game design student in our group and both Alex and I didn't feel confident enough to create a game on Unity in time that we would stay away from a coding heavy type game. This was a big deciding factor in what we were going to create.

I created a Miro for the team to use and we began putting Ideas on it. As we were talking on teams it became clear that a card game based around language might be our best Idea to go forward with. Alex and I both are strong graphic designers and we were happy to come up with an aesthetic for the cards while both Jack and Rachel were able to give us Spanish words for each card. The game we wanted to create was a Spanish language card game for children. These would be basic words in Spanish for children to learn. They would be categorised and have a corresponding colour as well as image to help learn both the Spanish and English from the card. On the Miro Alex and I looked at what colours we would incorporate on the cards. As a team we started to talk about what categories we would include in the game. The categories were broken into;

1. Fruit & Veg - Red

2. Weather - Blue

3. Animals - Green

4. Sports - Purple

5. Clothes & Accessories - Yellow

6. Household Items - Orange

Photo from our Miro

Alex and I used Adobe Illustrator and started to create how the cards would actually look for our game. The language students took the categories and started to translate words we chose into Spanish. After we had the words Alex and I were going to get the Icons for the words and create the cards for the game. We used The NounProject which is a royalty free icon website. To ensure our game had a cohesive theme we searched for a collection of icons in a heading on The Noun Project website. This meant that the icons would have the same line work and thickness which we felt was really important to have in our game to keep it looking like the cards all came from the one game. There were some problems with this as we were both in charge of a pack with three decks in it. We had to keep in contact with each other in order to ensure the cards were looking similar.

A select few of the cards I made front & back

Here was the final design of our cards. We both helped to create this final design. I created the back of the card from the different colours in the categories and by making a pattern on Illustrator and repeating. I felt giving a back image for the card would help to really create this card game. From this pattern I also made a cover image for our game for itch.io

One of the Issues we face was how we were going to distribute our game on itch.io. As we discussed it more and more I brought it to the group we can do it as a downloadable game and people can print the cards out and play as they want. We had already came up with 4 different ways to play the card game so this made the most sense that people can print whichever cards they want. We would do two packs that could be downloaded and printed out. I created a template of what to do once the cards were printed. This showed how you can cut and glue the images together to create the card or you could just fold the card to your liking in order to use.

 

The final takeaways is that I did really enjoy the Game Jam. I wish I was on a team with a game designer and that I could have learned a bit more of that side of game development. I was looking forward to gaining some more knowledge about coding and some tips and tricks. The workload was a lot more weighed on the CDM students and I feel this was a general consensus with the class. The language students didn't have access to different adobe programmes so it was hard for them to have input in that way. After the Game Jam it was great to see the different ways some people made their games. I heard of some people using Roblox and another group using Tinytap. These are things I never heard of but was interesting to see these new programmes and how they can be used to easily put together a game. This just all comes down to who is in your group and who is has used these kinds of things before. It was a weekend of playing to your groups strengths as there was such a short time frame to get the job done. We created a visually appealing card game for children and although the game isn't groundbreaking, I feel it was made to a high standard and there was still a lot of effort put in over the weekend actually creating these cards and our game. I enjoyed the overall experience of the Game Jam.