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Why Game Jams Matter

arimia

Often we think of game jams as small, random events that game developers enter just for fun and bragging rights- but, they give developers so much more than we bargained for.

Game Jams are events held every single day across the world and online with thousands of different themes and time constraints. Some last 2 months; some last a train ride; and some last an hour. Some have thousands in prizes and some have nothing more than bragging rights. But still, why do we enter them besides fun? What’s the point if you’re already working on a fulltime project? There’s a lot of reasons why.
1) Having a Finished ProductThis is a bragging right of course but it’s also tangible evidence that you can deliver a product you made from start to finish. It’s something you can share to prospective employers. It’s something you can use to market yourself with and gain a fanbase. It’s something you can use as a starting base for a bigger/expanded project. But most of all, it’s something you finished.

Most game jam games aren’t perfect. Hell, most of them haven’t even gotten close to being polished. But they’re still mostly playable and in a “finished” (but not polished) state. These games can be proof of concepts for future projects or your abilities.

2) Cutting Scope

A vital part of finishing and shipping any project is being able to make a reasonable scope and cutting it when needed. A scope that’s to large is the biggest killer of projects- they just can’t handle all the work and the game never gets done. “What if we added this feature here?” “How about there’s this mechanic for this section of the game?” “Let’s add a new character to this scene.” It’s things like this that add up over time- some are more obvious than others. The ability to take a scope and cut it in half is a seriously undervalued skill of project management.

3) Networking

After doing a game jam you typically end up afterwards rating and playing other entries- this is a great time to make friends and network with them. In layman’s terms, networking is basically creating contacts by making friends with people. That’s it. Play games and give feedback on them, let people know who you are.

4) Game Dev Experience

Working on a game will teach you some mechanics, but finishing a game will help solidify them- not only do you know how to work in an engine enough to get things moving, but you understand them enough to make a complete project. You’ll learn about all the assets that it takes to make a finished product. It’s hard to fully realize how many assets go into a game until you’re trying to wrap everything up and oh no there’s no sound effects and also the main menu barely works.

Game jams are a lot more important than people think, and are a great way to get started in game dev by finishing a small project. I always try to tell new devs to do a game jam first before jumping headfirst into a long term project, and I hope this article goes over why.
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2018 Year in Review – A Hectic but Informative Year

arimia
It’s that time of year again, that time after Christmas but before New Years… the time when we all try to hurry up and finish what we’re working on to finish one last thing before the next year… but, that also means it’s time to look back and see what was accomplished this year!
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♦ 2018 Releases ♦

As Vast as the Sea

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As Vast as the Sea was an entry for Ludum Dare #41. It follows Erita, a young woman who becomes lost at sea until she wakes up in Ogygia, an underwater world full of mermaids and secrets.
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​That Which Binds Us

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That Which Binds Us was originally a demo I made for IGMC 2017 and then extended into a full visual novel in Ren’Py. It’s my first fully commercial game and first game on Steam, so I’m pretty happy with it! It changed a fair amount in development to the finished product and I learned a lot from it’s release- a lot of which makes me more confident about Asterism.
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I Saw Him Today

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I Saw Him Today was an entry for Ludum Dare #42. It’s a short, experimental and completely linear game about dealing with grief among other things. It’s one of my favorite if not favorite Ludum Dare entries I’ve made, and I wasn’t the only one to think so since it ranked #12th in Mood.
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​Crossed Paths:Connected Worlds ~ At First Sight ~

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Crossed Paths:Connected Worlds ~ At First Sight ~  was an entry to Yuri Game Jam 2018 and a remake of my very first visual novel, Crossed Paths:Connected Worlds (which was made in 2014 for Ludum Dare #30. It follows mostly the same story as the original but with better writing, choices, art, etc.
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​Left Behind

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I’d be remiss to only talk about successes this year, wouldn’t I? Well, I did release 5 complete games this year as usual (1 big release, 3 Ludum Dare releases, and one additional game jam release), and that includes Left Behind. While not a total failure, it’s certainly not on par with the rest for a number of reasons ranging from final exams to lack of interest. It was an entry for Ludum Dare #43, and follows a group of friends making a video about an abandoned mansion.I’ve thought about extending it some and adding more endings, but I’m still uncertain whether that would equal quality. Since MV doesn’t like to port to Android (despite claiming that it does) it’s hard to say if I’ll spend the time editing this when I could spend that time making an Android port for That Which Binds Us.
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♦ 2018 Resolutions ♦

​Now that we’ve gone over what all I’ve released this year, let’s go over what my resolutions were for this year! (copied and pasted from last year’s year in review)

  • Publish all the games I’ve started. Now, this one comes with a bit of a catch- basically, I want to publish something from every project I’ve started. I want to finish That Which Binds Us, upload the update for The Witch in the Forest, finish a side project, and upload a demo for Asterism (as I’m shooting more for summer of 2019 now). That sounds like a lot, as you also have to include all three Ludum Dare games I hope to make in 2018 and maybe other side projects, but I’m nearing completion on a lot of projects right now, so publishing 5~ games this year isn’t out of my scope at all.
  • Get faster at writing. In 2017 I started writing much more heavily, and thus got better at it as I went along. In 2018, I want to focus on writing better and faster.
  • Get better at marketing. Yeah, I’ve learned marketing is super important this past year. So, in 2018 I want to get better at it.

Publish all the games I’ve started. Haha…. yeah…….. I definitely did only half of this……… I’m not close to a full demo yet for Asterism, but I did publish a demo for Paths Taken! So…. close…….

Get faster at writing. I’d say this one was accomplished, since That Which Binds Us was around 60,000-70,000 words long and only took me around 4~ months to write it while the original draft for Asterism was only about 45,000 and took me over half a year to write.

Get better at marketing. I’d like to say this one is accomplished! This past year was a bunch of reading, studying, asking questions, and researching, and now I’m freelancing as a marketer for other visual novels. So, I’ve definitely learned a thing or two about it.

♦ 2019 Resolutions ♦

Now onto resolutions for 2019! There’s a bunch of small ones like “be more active in clubs at school” (which I already am, but I want to keep it up), “panel at my local convention”, etc. but here’s my main list for 2019:

  • Publish Paths Taken and a demo for Asterism. This… is a big one. Paths Taken is currently about 60% done, with the route divergences being written and coded right now, so I’m hopeful we can have it ready around the summer. Asterism, on the other hand, is a very different story- the RPG sections are giving me trouble but I plan to, for now, code the entire game in VN style (as you’ll have the ability to pick between playing it as an RPG with VN sections or as a pure VN), send that to testing, and then finish the rest. There’s a lot of assets still needed so I’m very unsure of what percentage of the entire game is done.
  • Market further. I want Asterism to be a success so once I’m nearing the demo stage I’ll be amping up my marketing. I’m really hoping to get it into some festivals and competitions as well as share it wherever I can.

…That’s really all I can think of as major goals go. There are some I’ve mentioned here that I consider “smaller” such as entering more competitions both at school and online and hopefully paneling at my local convention, but these are the main ones I want to work on.

So, here’s to another great year! Thank you all for sticking by me and reading!
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Yes, You Can Start Marketing Too Late

arimia

Marketing is something you should be doing constantly while a game is in development- but at what point is it too late to start?

If you remember one thing from my articles, remember this- marketing should be seen as an integral part of game dev, much like programming and visuals, and should be done all during and after development. However, there will always be cases where people didn’t market their games or crowdfunding projects enough- as sad as these are, a lot of times they simply won’t be able to recover from that loss of a major amount of sales on launch. So, at what point does it become too late to start marketing and it become better to delay a launch?

Let’s look at crowdfunding first. Most people who’ve looked into Kickstarter have probably heard that you need to get 30% of your goal in the first 48 hours, and a recent study has found that to be pretty true. So what does that mean? It means that the biggest push of pledges needs to be at launch. Therefore, starting to market after the Kickstarter launch would be extremely detrimental to the campaign.

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A graph from Kickstarter themselves in 2011.
​Your game launch isn’t much different. According to a Gamasutra post by Jake Birkett, the average amount of sales on Steam is around 58% of your wishlist numbers- what this means is that if you have 200 wishlists then you can expect to sell around 100 units on launch week. As Simon Carless went over recently in his own Gamasutra post, wishlist counts have become an exceedingly reliable way of telling how well a game will sell after launch.
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“If your game has 1,000 wishlists on launch, it may sell 500 copies in your first week and 2,500 copies in your first year on Steam.”

What does this tell us? It tells us that collecting wishlists (for games being sold on Steam) is a good way to not only get people to be notified about the game on launch but is also a good indicator of how well the game will sell. This also means that we need to focus on driving wishlists (or maybe newsletter subscriptions for a non-Steam platform) before the game releases.
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Make it a goal to gain wishlists months before launch.

Let’s do some further math. At the time of writing this (yes, I just checked), Asterism gets around 4-6~ wishlists a day on Steam.

  • Asterism does not have a demo out yet
  • Asterism is not 100% being actively promoted (2 other games are sharing promotion time with it)

With this context, we can reasonably assume that the amount of passive daily wishlists will increase once there’s a demo released (which will lead to let’s plays and journal coverage) and the project is being worked on more frequently.

Each week Asterism currently gets around 36~ wishlists. This means that, if it kept up this rate, in a year…

36 x 52 = 1872
…Asterism would have an additional 1800~ wishlists. Not great, considering the game (hopefully!) won’t take that long to complete and when you see the results from the Gamasutra articles. But like I said, this number should increase with more coverage, a demo, etc.Let’s say that each week Asterism will gain around 50 wishlists. If this is the average rate, then in a year…

50 x 52 = 2600
…Asterism would have around an additional 2600~ wishlists. It’s looking somewhat better, but not by too much again considering the game most likely won’t be sitting there raking in wishlists for another year.So what does this tell us? Put Steam pages / Newsletter signups when you can. Start gaining those leads early and collecting them over the entire development process.
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What point is too late to start marketing?

Games have different development cycles and time lengths- I’ve released games that took 48 hours and some that took 8 months. Therefore, I find it hard to give a sure timeframe in months or such, but I’d say you should stop what you’re doing if you’re 2/3rds of the way through development and have not set up store pages, social media, etc.​If your game will take you about 8 months to develop, you should consider halting progress to give time to properly market the game if you’re 2 months from launch and haven’t started at all- sometimes slowing a project in order to get the word out about the project.

In recap… start collecting wishlists early and give yourself time to tell the world about your game!

Wishlist my game on Steam!

Asterism