New stickers 😍

Arrived at a game jam in an animation school. I hope they're better at game design than they are at cable management :)

The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

at the game jam afterparty everyone where trying to speak with my husband, instead of me. I saw human version of blue screens when was asked to list my project team and I didn't mention him.
- A-a-and what did Rik do?
- Oh, he didn't participate, he's a journalist and my +1 here. 😅

Some time ago I went for a job interview (Unity3D Dev). I have little experience in this field and never thought that I would get this job but wanted to gain some and thought that it would be a great opportunity.
So after the interview, which was great and I really enjoyed it, I've been tasked with making a simple minigame. Only requirements were that there have to be player controls, character must avoid obstacles and camera must be moving with player's progress. I've made a little spin on those. In 2d minigame I've created you are piloting simple (made out of 3d primitives) rocket. You have to avoid randomly spawned platforms. If you hit one, you explode. You also die, if you hit a wall or fall out of camera and hit Destroyer. Camera is constantly moving as long as you are moving. The spin is that you have very limited fuel. To regain it you have to land on said platforms with your thrusters. It took me around 12h to make this game. The only reason I know it is because they wanted this info. I've learned a bit while working on this minigame and had a lot of fun. It was a great impuls to start learning gamedev again and stop stagnation I fell in when I started my studies and work.
Today I've got response. Obviously I didn't get the job. They took more experienced person and I totally understand that. But there's more. They were so great to give me pretty extensive review of what was done good, what could be done better and how to gather more experience. They said that the game met their expectations and was written well. That's great, because I was worried that it would be bad since I haven't worked on graphics at all.
So, at least I got an impulse to start learning and maybe I'll even go for some game jam!

My evening routine:
*puts down the laptop near the bed
*puts a glass of water near the laptop
*thinks about “fuck you idiot, you gonna rekt your laptop some day”
*goes to sleep
So tonight it finally happened... global game jam in 2 days and i don’t have a fucking laptop
Im so mad at myself rigt now

Global Game Jam anyone?)

After 10 years of thinking of getting into gamedev, I just joined a team game jam and it's going somewhere.

4 months ago I wrote a rant about how difficult it was for me to get into gamedev.

I guess I finally started because:
a) I'm not doing this alone
b) Another person takes care of the art

Regarding "a", computing, programming can be a very lonely task. I realized how much I missed the college years where I was paired up with other people to do something

There's something magical about being in a team.
You may not be a fan of your mates personalities. You may even hate their guts.

But working on something together, when everyone does the thing they should do, when things just flow... it's just magical.

When that happens, "all the bullshit goes away"™, and it's just you and your team sharing the same hope.

As for "b", I think I realized that, at least for my way of thinking, art (even in an initial, rudimentary state) is what ends up creating a game.

While I always tried to do it the other way around, first the game, then the art.

Maybe now I could dabble into pixel art and then use that as the thing that would define the game.

I was also an emotional mess for most of my 20s (and still kinda am, but not that much), so I guess that made getting into gamedev hard too.

Now, here's the negative part: the guy that does the art (and also codes) sucks balls at communicating and at git.

He takes a shitload of time to respond, doesn't address the things I state are important, doesn't join the damn trello, sometimes gives me some sass on his comments.
And he accidentally overwrote my changes on git three times.

The good thing is that he acknowledges his fuckups and fixes them.

I'm not really mad though. I'm almost 30, he's 20 or so.

When I was 20 I was a goddamn mess.
And it's just a week, and the pleasure of working with someone is far greater.

One of the coolest projects I've worked on recently was this little adventure game I made for a game jam a while back, It was made from scratch with Golang and C over two days. It also features procedural level generation (that technically should allow the user to walk in one direction for at least 7 decades).

I worked on a game jam last year, and for the first time I managed to finish a full software project that wasn't for a job or university. It was really fun to work on, and seeing my vision come to life, even if compromises had to be made, as well as applying all the programming and project management knowledge I'd picked up until then was an experience unlike anything I'd had before.

The community aspect was great too, everybody shared and discussed each other's games and were super friendly and encouraging.

"let's use git for this game jam"

Wait! Don't go! I love git and use it on every project I work on! You'll have to hear me out here.

This was 4 years ago, at my first Global Game Jam. Every jam and game I'd worked on up to that point, I was the only Dev; no need for git, as backups were more than enough. I joined a group with high hopes for the game jam, with three coders and a proper art team.

The entire jam was "1 step forward 2 steps back", as git somehow constantly overwrote code as fast as we could write it.

By the end of the jam we barely had anything to show for our hard work. The takeaway isn't even about git. It's simply to never work with other people. Git is a great protocol but it can't stop people from accidentally fucking other people over. Every jam since, I've worked on my own and had a far better time of it.

Found this pearl on the code of the game I made with some friends on a game jam the last week
Beautiful

The only time i pulled an all nighter was during the global game jam. You have to make a game in 48 hours and there were some nice to haves that I had to implement.

In 48 hours I slept only 5 hours. The rest of the time I was mostly programming.

Found out today that someone who started game dev with a game jam I started in university has a top 10 game on steam!

Took part on the Global Game Jam this weekend :)

Entered a demake game jam and can't decide whether to demake DOOM (2016) or Skyrim...

Hmmm, choices and choices, anyone else have suggestions?

Thinking about taking part in a two colour game jam on the weekend, I'm thinking some kind of retro space adventure game.
(I'm not the best pixel artist, but I'm pretty happy with how this mock-up looks)

!rant

Just finished my first game jam officially, it was fun and our game though being not working 100% was well done, we had art people and a sound guy, who btw made some amazing music for the game. A couple of us plan to work on the game after the jam (because we have time) and since it's more of a local jam our deadline for submission is extended until a week after the jam finishes. (Game broke after merge issues :D)

Glad I decided to go and try it out.

Hah but my issue was that moreso my time was spent on getting unity and a git gui or some sort to work on Linux mint, by half way through Saturday I did lol. Also not much for me to do since we had a total of six programmers.

So if I don't get a new laptop for the next game jam, it's setup to work, which is awesome.

[reminder] At the end of the month I will participate with the GGJ for the first time. Who of you has participated in the past and/or will participate this month?

Ive been planning this for 5 years now but every year I forgot... That's why I placed this reminder. Have fun everyone who will participate.

Suddenly remembering that you're in a two week game jam and you've only got 3 days to put something together!

Once when I attended Global Game Jam, I worked on a game pretty much 36 hours straight, excluding some lunch breaks. Didn't sleep for 46 hours.

Gotta say, was a pretty weird feeling to wake up to tuesday when I went to sleep like 4 AM on monday. I slept over 20 hours. I remember waking up at one point and thinking that I'm still tired, so I'll just go back to sleep.

That was the one time when I truly 'slept a day away'.

Attending in a local game jam with some friends.
One of the team members wrote the worst code I've ever seen. After him realizing that it's buggy as hell he left to sleep having me fixing his mess at 4 am to somehow get something done by the end of the event.
It resulted in me rewriting nearly everything he had done.

Guess which team didn't manage to have something playable in the end...

Come to a weekly deep learning meet up this morning 8.30AM. The event start at 10 AM.  While waiting I read news and play some game. As time near 10 o'clock I had strange feeling: The guest room so quiet, just me and 2 security guy.

Okay I think comittee that run this event a bit late because of traffc jam and I wait more. In the end the committee didn’t even show until 10.30AM. Later I found on another data science group today's event is postponed and I go home.

WHY DIDNT YOU GUYS MAKE ANNOUNCEMENT ON SLACK? YOU WASTE MY TIME WAITING 2 HOURS

Attend a global game jam with my cousin who is kinda lazy and is looking for girls. I find a good Unity developer and make him join our team. He coded and I helped for everything he needed for looking for music, graphics etc at the end he presented it and claimed all the credit

My first game jam,
I was first excited about coding but when I started, I was caring about making my code clean, and I lost too much time focusing on this... You should see the end, such a mess ! Spaghetti code, pointers everywhere but hey, it worked 😊

what do you all think about a game jam but instead of having 24hrs+ you only get 5 hours? I've been wondering how this would be seen and whether this a good idea, so I came here to see your thoughts

Anyone participated in the Ludum Dare 39 game jam last week end ?

Limitation as a way to force creativity. What do you think about this?

Platforms such as Vine or Twitter limits you somehow, but people still found a way to build their creativity around and grow a following. At the same rate, most Game Jams give you a theme and sometimes some kind of limitations and the result is in almost every jam at least a few interesting games.

Now, looking specifically at dev work, some frameworks or languages limit you somehow. Lets think about Rust safety or Node single threadness.

Do you think those work as limitation to enhance creativity as well? Not necessary by design.

About to start my first game jam. Any tips?

Are there any decently sized developer jams in Northern Ireland? I can't seem to find any

Did any of you guys participate in the Ludum Dare?

Attends Game Jam, gets placed right next to esport event speakers, and apparently it's an open game jam where People can come watch us.. We have to use Defold which none of us have used, which makes us All look as idiots.. What the fuck, also the host arrived 2 hours late because he was hungover...