Game Jam Retrospective
Last weekend we held our first coding event, which we called [sKaiNet] Game Jam/Hackathon because naming things is hard sometimes. The primary motivators for the jam were to get fresh eyeballs on the Kaipod, and test out our software devkit (SDK). In the spirit of Trijam, we scheduled the sKaiNet Game Jam/Hackathon to officially run for three hours on a Saturday afternoon.
This is an experiment, an art project, and a beginning. We are excited to see what you will create.
– The guide
Our API lets any number of games share a set of 5 elemental counters: Fire, Earth, Wind, Water, and Aether. Any game can increment or decrement the counters according to their own rules, and it’s up to the jammers to decide what each element corresponds to in their game and how they want to interact with it.
We decided to keep this jam small. Why? Our devs have participated in game jams before, but this was our first go-round at running one. It’s important to us to respect the time and effort of everyone who gets involved with Kaimerra, so we wanted to get some lower-stakes firsthand experience with the admin side before going big.
The Goods
Here are the tools we found most useful:
A guide for participants: We wrote a “Getting Started” document with instructions for accessing the Kaipod app and our SDK.
An Integrated Development Environment (IDE): We used Replit to host our SDK. (Our API is on GitHub.)
An exit survey: Always a good idea, but an extra good idea if you’re running your first thing and are looking for valuable feedback.
The Games
Here’s what we made:
One team used Godot to write the framework for a tower defense game with a twist: different towers and monsters have elemental affinities, and in each round players can “bet” on which elements will outperform others to gain an advantage.
Another team created an extremely hypnotic plinko board by adding gravity wells whose strength was determined by using the shared counters.
A third team made a game about fire safety.
the gleanings
What are our main takeaways from this, our inaugural game jam?
Flexibility is key to maximizing participation, so plan for it. We scheduled a three-hour block of time for folks to use Kaimerra’s office space, but aside from the core dev team, most participation was remote and asynchronous, and everyone found themselves needing more than the allotted time to work on their projects.
The guidelines we gave were pretty broad: Take this stuff, craft an experience. One piece of participant feedback was that adding game ideas or examples to the documentation would be helpful, especially given the abstract nature of the shared counters.
With such a short time window where everyone was jamming simultaneously, inter-group discussion wasn’t as effortless as it could have been. Having dedicated time and space to debrief and check out other teams’ projects is a must for future events.