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Only 9 days to go until we all starts! (tips for beginners)

A topic by CMaxo created May 11, 2022 Views: 441 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 4
Submitted(+1)

I only wished to add a bit more variety to the posts around and giving some tips to those who are starting with their first jam.

In less than 9 days (from this post), the theme will be displayed and we will all be able to start jamming.

Have you though about what kind of game you'll work on yet?
Even without a theme, you can still think of the kind of game you'll be working on and that's applicable before the dev jam even started. A theme usually doesn't decide what kind of gameplay you'll be working on. Kinda like it's possible to have a racing game of any kind of story/setting/styles or having a fighting game with any characters, knowing what you'll be working on ahead is crucial at making the experience a good one instead of just a stress-filled bad one.

I already have 2 kinds of games and 1 partial kind of game in mind with notes of each on notepads I have around. Depending on the theme, I'll select the kind of game that fits the best in my opinion once said theme it's revealed.

Have you looked online for sources for open source assets yet?
There's nothing stopping you from looking and downloading open source assets ahead of the start. Last thing you want is to waste hours on looking for generic stuff you could have found days before the jam. The most common assets dev jams devs usually lost the most time on are audio files such as sounds. Open source sounds aren't always good one or lacks in quality and, in many case, might not even fit with your needs so having a bank of those ahead of time can save you a lot of trouble. Obviously, you don't have to download everything available online so you should, at the very list, make yourself a list of bookmarks for sites (or search results on sites) for your particular needs you think you might have during the jam.

There are a few links on this discussion board you can look into. You can also search for your own sources too.

Have you prepared yourself in real-life for the devs jam?
Usually, everyone has a life outside of the jam, so it's never a bad idea to prepare yourself for the jam. Make sure you got food available for those 10 days. Make sure your coworker knows what you'll be getting into. If you got a family at hand, explain to them what you'll be working on. Not only they might help you (alleviate the family-life style), you'll be their hero once you're done with your game. They can be good source at finding issues you might have missed in your project too.

Practice while you can.
If you're not that much occupied yet, you can work on ideas and concepts ahead of time. There's nothing stopping your from creating a prototype of your project right now and test things out prior to the start. Kinda like how an 100m athlete does practice runs all the time and not just during competitions, keep practicing your devs skills so that, once you're in the competition you know what you're doing and avoid wasting time on "what if" and "how should I do it" questions. True, once the jam start you'll have to start from scratch, but the hardest part of game development is actually having a clear idea of how the game is played and how it's coded behind. If you already know how it's played and already wrote your own code for it to work, you just have to write it again during the jam and you'll have more time at adding more cool stuff into your project.

Set a proper time sheet and workflow
Let's be honest, we all hate looking at a clock while working on anything. Time either goes too slow or too fast. This is why you should prepare a time sheet with your main goals set within the 10 days frame and think of how you'll achieve those goal (workflow). How many hours per day will you work on the project? How much rest will you have? How much time you need for each steps? What's the B plans in case you fails to reach your goal, if any possible? 10 days is really little in game development and you might consider actually having 8 days since there's nothing telling you that everything will work fine when you'll build your game for submission. You might loose 1 or 2 days on that alone!

I know... it happened to me twice out of 3 devs jams I worked in. Issues with unknown limits within the core of the Unity engine generated major game breaking issues in my project only on specific kind of builds.

A tip for submitting your game source and build
When submitting your build, make sure you clean it up as much as possible. In the source, you don't have to includes the original prepared source files if they are not used in the engine itself. Clean up any files that are NOT in use. You might think that the engine will clean up the unused files when building the client files, but that's not exactly true as there's a particular setup to follow for it to work and this setup can break your game. Having the build purged of all unused files makes the build faster with lighter files and it's easier to share your project source files. The judges don't need to see your 6 version of a file if you don't use those 6 in the result. If you use Photoshop's PSD files in-engine, turn those into PNG or JPEG or whatever you want that is lighter. Remove unused audio and image files. You might not know it, but both Unity and Unreal don't purge any audio and image files (even unused ones) because those can be loaded dynamically through scripts and their compiler aren't smart enough to detect dynamic references. (Well, there's an option to purge all unused files types by force, but that breaks 90% of the projects so I don't consider it an option.)

Submitted

Thanks. It helps me a lot.

Submitted

Thanks for that! what things are considered "source"? Like what can i actually import?...code, art, prefabs, assets, etc....

And if i join a group since only one person actually uploads, would the entire group get a free course?

Thanks a BUNCH! 馃槑

Cheers

Submitted(+1)

"Source" is basically the project's folder you created and used to create the game client's build. For example, with Unity, it's the folder that contains the .vs (hidden), Asset, Library, Logs, obj, Packages, ProjectSettings, UserSettings, .vsconfig and a bunch of .csproj files (and a .sln files with the project's name). To put it in simple terms, it's what's required to build a full working version of your project directly from the engine client itself.

It doesn't have to includes original sources files in foreign formats if those aren't used directly in the engine. For example, files like a .ai (Adobe Illustrator) to makes .svg files or .psd(Photoshop) to make the .png or .jpeg or .tiff files are not necessary. If you use .psd files as-is in the engine (like Unity that allows it), you HAVE to includes those, but if you exported the files as another format to be used, you just have to includes those exported files. It's the same with audio files such as original recordings and files made by particular audio editing software. If you recorded yourself and edited the sounds, you don't have to include the original recording nor the specific files generated by the editing software that contains the editing (and may requires a paid program), but only the result files (.wav, .mp3, .midi).

There's a kind-of-gray area regarding paid tools allowed which allows you to use paid tools as long as you don't have to include said tool in your project. For example, if you can make your soundtrack in Music Maker with paid sounds effects as you don't have to include the Music Maker's file, but only the MP3 (.mp3) or Wave (.wav) files resulted from exporting the soundtrack. This is why they give the example of Gaia which is a paid asset that allows you to generate Terrain Mesh data (doesn't require Gaia to use anymore) as long as you remove Gaia from the project's assets when submitting the sources files while keeping the resulted Terrain Mesh data files.

From what there has been mentioned, all members in a group gets a free course as long as it's within reasonable. Team with 10+ members might be a bit overkilling it unless in a specific situation and you should check the other posts about it. I have always worked alone so I can't tell how to "make" a group for submitting a project on itch.io, but a safe bet would be to include, in your project, a credits list including their itch.io usernames. How the free course will be distributed is yet to be known, except that people will get it after submitting. Maybe they will send a message to the group leader (the one who submit the project) which will allow you to reply a list of GameDev.tv account emails and which course each of those emails can get unlocked.

Just to make it clear, I'm not part of the group managing this Dev Jam. It's my 3rd one. I did one like this one (but a 1-year dev jam which I did within its last 2 months for fun), 1 closed 24-hours Dev Jam (the kind which you CAN'T prepare ahead since you work on someone else PC) and this is my 3rd one. (The main reason why I don't participate in many Dev Jam is because I live in Quebec in Canada and the laws here for contests are managed by a government's group called Loto Quebec which make it relatively impossible for any international contests to allow the it to be run in that province, unless the prize is non-monetary or educational. To put it simple, if the prize is either monetary or of a greater value than 500$ CAD and is not educational and the contest is not to fund a non-lucrative registered event, the contest management has to pay 50% of the 3 main prize values in a fee. If you look at any international contest with such value in prize, you'll often see "Excluding Quebec in Canada" in the condition. As this contest has an educational-based prize, I can participate in it.)

To give an idea of how you can prepare for this kind of open Dev Jam, I'm already done with the general concept of my project and timeline for those 10 days. Considering how long it took me to build up the idea, I saved around 3-4 days of none-productive brainstorming and, at this moment, I got a really good idea of what it will be like. Saving 3-4 days out of 10 days is insanely big and can make an huge difference. I took notes of what kind of menu, inputs, gameplay element the game will have. I also got a few potential ideas depending on what kind of theme will be revealed as my idea can be converted in almost any kind of themes relatively easily. (I do have one favorite kind of setup if the theme allows it, but that will depends.)

My idea currently uses audios cues (and visual cues) to generate the soundtrack and the gameplay is based on it. The concept allows a difficulty selection system to be implemented only with a few lines of codes. I already have looked and downloaded a bunch of images online for references as my idea of the visual style follow a specific kind of look. (It might be for naught if the Jam's theme is too much specific or restrictive, but there are barely any chances it happens.)

As I find my idea really good, I do plan on following up, regardless of the results in the jam, with a commercial mobile release of it with more features so if it wins, it's only adds more onto my project for the next 1-2 months. That's the kind of possible follow-up you can find with these kind of Dev Jams contests. :)

Submitted

Thanks man! you are a great help! this is my first jam so this info was critical! so thanks so much! i hope your game goes well! 馃榿

Cheers! 

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