Global Game Jam 2019 and Kaiju Homecoming

This past weekend was Global Game Jam 2019, and I was the site organizer for Ball State's location. It was my third time serving as site organizer here. I want to capture a few thoughts about the weekend's events here before they get too far way.

We had 21 people register, almost all of whom showed up. There were several people who came on Friday but then didn't return, unfortunately. I have seen this each year, and I think it tends to be people who are interested novices. They don't know how to move from idea to implementation, and they are not familiar with the little failures that are to be expected along the way. I take a laissez faire approach to site organization: I don't manage teams or themes, but instead I encourage people to use the whiteboards around the room to gather interested people. I've thought about whether I should include more didactic interventions, but the truth is that teaching is already my job: the jam is about jamming after all. I would never kick an amateur musician out of a jam session if they wanted to participate, but I would also not be surprised if they left. Perhaps it sounds a bit harsh when I write it out, which makes me think I need to work on better packaging for my pragmatic philosophy.

This relates to something I want to share about this year's keynote. I had a sense that none of the four speakers were actually talking to my audience: mostly novice jammers. The thoughts they shared might resonate with people who already know what they are doing, but that's not helpful if you have no grounding. Let me pick on one particular example. Rami Ismail was the most on-point of the three speakers, but he made a claim in his presentation that you cannot do a game jam wrong. I firmly disagree: there are many, many ways to do things wrong. Here are several: being an unpleasant team member, for example by refusing to compromise on your ideas or by not keeping your commitments; focusing on accidentals such as title and credits screens rather than the essence of the game; taking too long to get to a minimally playable state; thinking that ideas have value rather than implementations; not considering packaging or deployment until just before the deadline. These are the kinds of mistakes that I have seen jammers make and, more to my point above, that I see novices make in my game design and game programming classes. In fact, I think it's much easier to do it wrong than to do it right—regardless of the quality of the final product. I think a rhetoric that says you cannot do things wrong sets novices up for mistakes and frustrations.

At the end of the jam, we had four playable projects. There were two more that were "done" but not uploaded, one of them because the jammer disregarded my and others' advice to stop trying to add features and instead to figure out how to package and upload his work, and the other because he could not make it on Sunday and didn't get around to uploading his.

Last year, my oldest son came and participated in the jam, making two games of his own in the time it took me to break one. This year, I encouraged him to come again, but I told him that I really wanted us to work together on something. He actually started working on his own anyway right after the theme announcement, but once I reminded him that I really wanted to collaborate, he was up for it.

We struggled to turn the theme ("What home means to you") into a game idea. One of our best sketches was of a game where the family stands around the counter, waiting for Mom to look away, reaching out and grabbing tidbits to eat before the siblings can. I imagined we might even use a polka soundtrack and be able to name it after the Shmenge hit, "Who stole the cabbage roll?" As we kept talking, though, we somehow pulled inspiration from Terror in Meeple City and the idea that kaiju have a home as well... and there are people in it, and we don't want those people there. This was the idea that became Kaiju Homecoming.

We built a minimally playable version in Unreal Engine just to make sure the pieces would fit, just dropping a plane onto some cylindrical columns and throwing a ball at it. We laughed from the get-go. I asked my friend Emma if she could make up some digital meeples, and so she and her friend Jessica provided these models. The next day, my son worked on some more original art for the floors and he did all the level design. We had to tweak the level a few times because we couldn't get the floors to stack nicely on the columns in the UE4 editor. Playing the game, you can see the physics solver create wobbles and even occasional collapses as a result. There are probably snapping or simulation sleeping settings that we could use to fix that, but I am really happy with the look and feel, given our constraints. My son was also in charge of all the audio direction except for the soundtrack: I found the music on Kevin MacLeod's site, and he reviewed sound effects using the free weekend access to SoundSnap. We had the game mostly finished on Saturday, and because of other family obligations, we only had a few hours to work on Sunday, right before the deadline. We got as much polish in as we could, and the game was complete.

The game runs best as a Windows 64-bit executable, and you can download the project for Windows from the Global Game Jam site. We also produced a Web build that I've hosted on GitHub: it's more accessible, but lacks the performance of the native version. All the source code and assets are in a repository on GitHub as well, although we actually used Perforce Helix for version control during development. Finally, for those who want the quick overview, I recorded this short gameplay video:

It was a fun weekend jamming with my son and seeing what the other jammers put together. I've started some conversations that might lead us to a different location for the 2020 jam, but that's a long way off to worry about planning. Now, I need to return to all the tasks that I put in the "I'll take care of this after Global Game Jam" bin.

What do you make?

I've dabbled with different approaches to having students introduce themselves. In my game design classes, I've generally asked students to share their last great play experiences. This allows us to share some lighthearted stories and start discussing the relationship between "play" and "game." In my HCI class the last two semesters, I've asked students what they want to learn. Last semester's experience with this was not very interesting, since most students said some variation on "how to design interfaces." It's not a bad answer, but it's also not surprising.

This semester, I decided to take a hint from my good friend Easel Monster, as explained in the first minute of this video:

Easel recommends that when you meet someone, you should ask what they make. I did this in both of my regular courses this semester. In the game studio course, which includes a multidisciplinary undergraduate teams, a lot of students gave games-related answers: video games, stories, fictional settings for tabletop roleplaying games, music. This was about what I expected since I recruited these students specifically to produce a video game: of course they would be makers at heart.

My other class is Human-Computer Interaction, an elective for Computer Science majors and minors. I have been out of teaching the prerequisite course (CS222) for several semesters. Where I used to recognize half or more of the students coming into my upper-level elective courses, this time I only knew a handful. That means only a handful knew me as well, although I do wonder if they thought they knew me through my reputation. In any case, on the first day, I took my customary mugshots, having each student hold up a sheet of paper with their name written on it. Having these photos makes it much easier for me to learn which names and faces go together. As they stood in front of the room, I asked them to give their name, where they are from (as broadly as they wish to answer), and to answer the question, "What do you make?" Some of them answered that they made Web pages or software, one in particular referencing software made at his job. Others said they made stories or, again, fictional worlds for tabletop roleplaying. Three specific answers jumped out at me as being especially interesting. One student answered that he makes sandwiches. That's a great thing to make! Someone in the class asked if he made special sandwiches, and he said he made a mean PB&J. Another answered that he made friends. You could practically hear the smiles break out among his classmates—is there anything better to make? Finally, one student said, "I don't know what I make, but I'm trying to figure that out." There's a curious one. On one hand, I say he's in the right place, so higher education can help him sort it all out. On the other hand, I wonder if it should be an entry exam to ask, "What do you make?" to help students think about it.

Thanks, Easel Monster!