Jam-ception meta narrative. I like it. I went to the opening night for a game jam a few months ago this year. Didnt find anyone I wanted to work with for a story game. Still cool to see it all.
Did you have anyone ask for help at your game jam?
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Thanks! Yeah, I've had the same happen to me sometimes. It can be hard to pitch something narrative-driven. I was actually more in shock one jam where people wanted to make my cute and quirky game, it felt very strange to suddenly be creative "lead" on a project. But it took some 10 jams of being open-minded, learning how to pitch, adapting to the project, to get to that point. And it was good experience, because I learnt how to put story in new places (and make a bunch of art).
At this jam, we had a Discord with good support and community, but no one asked me for help this time (although I did link some resources) :)
Perhaps I can try my local Game Jam again or join their Slack community. The sorts of games I saw in the few hang out times I was at were hardly any story games. Thought, "I'll make my own writing first."
Adapting your ideas to another team is a hugely important skill. Was that easy or hard after a ways of trying?
I see it as a design challenge, where I look for opportunity. Besides, there are a lot of programmers these days that are curious about story in games - this jam (link to entries) we had very story-heavy games, excellent ones, mostly made by programmers.
I'd also recommend looking into how you can make life easier for the rest of the team by learning the tools you'll need to put your writing in. For example, how to use the UI canvas text tools in Unity, or record and edit VO, and add audio if that's your preference. For example, learning Fungus or Ink plugins for branching narrative trees, or how to use a JSON /XML file to get your lines into the game (those are on my 'to learn' list). Because that takes a lot of learning responsibility off the programmers and makes it much more likely your content actually makes it into the game.