Happy Camper: A December 2024 FamJam Game

TL;DR: Check out our new game, Happy Camper.

On Saturday, my eldest son led the family in a one-day fam jam as part of fulfilling a Scouting merit badge. We had attended the Indy Indies 2024 Showcase the previous night and played the eight games featured there. Playing Hardcore Cottagecorre in particular got the boys talking about wanting to make a single-stick shooter. The older boys had played Vampire Survivors, but the others really just used Harcore Cottagecorree as their genre example. We laid out responsibilities and got to work a little after 8:00AM. We wrapped up work just before 5:00PM, giving us enough time to talk about our experience over dinner and then get out to see Christmas Carol at Muncie Civic Theatre. 

The result of our work is Happy Camper, which you can play in the browser as long as you have a keyboard and mouse. The game is free software and you can browse the source code on GitHub.

I told my friend a little about our experience yesterday, and he had some questions about what technology we used to create the game. To that end, here are some explanations and links. These are all no-cost, free, open source tools.

• We used Godot game engine to build the game, including its GDScript programming language.
• The art was made using Piskel, which is perfect for the pixel art aesthetic.
• The music was created using LMMS.
• The sound effects were recorded using Audacity.

My wife commented on how much smoother these jams go now that everyone has more experience using these various tools. There are two things that I myself need to remember from the experience. One is that I need to talk to the younger boys about how to think like a musician when approaching LMMS. Both have a tendency to try to "make it work" rather than trying to model how composition is approached, doing things like aligning notes to beats and measures. Admittedly, the piano roll interface in LMMS is less clear here than staff, and so maybe I need to look into showing them something like MuseScore or Rosegarden, both of which give you access to a traditional notation editor. 

The other observation I had was with respect to communication, internally and through the medium of game design. My second son took the task of designing a series of weapons that would work well together. He had a list that he considered finished, but I encouraged him to write them up in a way that they could be used as a specification, together with illustrations of how they would work. He did this, but he still described all seven weapons in half a small sketch book page, cramming them all together and including indecipherable drawings of the design intention. We talked briefly about how the task was not merely to inscribe his ideas onto a page, but to do so in a way that invited others to comment, edit, and learn from them. That is, there had to be more room for annotation, more space for people to read the diagrams together. He had succeeded at the "invention" part but was weak on the "communication" part (see Cockburn's argument that software development is a cooperative game of invention and communication). It's all part of the development of teamwork and game design, and I'm glad we had a chance to talk about it. I would like to have an opportunity soon to give him another similar task and see if he can apply our conversation.

This relates to a similar story from later in the day, when he and his elder brother were trying to figure out what to work on before we shipped the game. They seemed blind to the fact that, in its current state, the game was unlearnable and not fun to anyone. As makers of the game, they could play for about ten seconds, and there was no scaffolding for anyone who didn't know all the implementation details. I pushed them on this point, that unless we were making the game only for ourselves, we had to think about the perspective of new users—people who didn't know what the enemies or weapons looked like, where they would come from, or how these systems worked together. Giving them that charge, I left them for about an hour. When they pushed their changes, the game was much more enjoyable, with better balance and escalation without needing massive changes to the implementation. Of course, if we were not in a one-day jam, we could have done even more work here, but within our constraints, I think they did a great job, and I told them so. It was only later that I realized that this was in the same class of feedback as I had given my son earlier: to recognize that "done" needs to be considered from the perspective of the consumer, whether that is the reader of a design document or the player of a game.

It had been almost a year since our last Fam Jam. Some of us will certainly participate in Global Game Jam in January, but I hope it's not another year before we get the whole family involved. I'm not sure what will happen to our Fam Jam tradition once the boys start leaving the house.