Giving game-making a go at the Global Game Jam
I like to play games when I have the time, but I’ve never made a game in my life. Aside from playing around with a never-finished “choose your own adventure” story, I haven’t even thought much about it.
But when I heard that the Lodi Public Library would be hosting a site for the 2018 Global Game Jam, it sounded like a blast. I immediately signed up.
At 5 p.m. Friday, I was at the library, ready for a weekend of trying something new, along with a handful of other would-be game makers who would soon become Legfish Games: fellow News-Sentinel employee Susan Todd, her sister Cheryl, and Stockton college student Jenny Nguyen.
Thanks to Ninja Pandas — the educational nonprofit founded by Jateen “JT” Bhakta and Clare Bhakta to teach game design — and the Friends of the Lodi Library, a pair of rooms in the library were going to be our home base for the next 48 hours.
Supplied by coffee donated by School Grounds, along with a selection of snacks and drinks, we were ready to buckle in and get started ... as soon as the international organizers revealed this year’s theme: “transmission.”
The one-word theme — introduced on a video showing germs, car engines, radio signals and satellites — was just vague enough to give us a bunch of ideas: Could we do a game about a zombie or vampire invasion? Something about disease vectors, like “Pandemic”? Maybe something with messages?
We settled on that last one, with a vague idea of a player receiving secret messages through a game.
The first few hours were about narrowing down the story. At the end of Friday’s planning, we had the barest outlines of a visual novel: “Heroes of Kirbyville,” named for comic book legend Jack Kirby.
In our “game-within-a-game,” a newly hired game tester would be looking for bugs in a superhero game. They’d work with in-game allies like Police Commissioner Capewell and fellow hero Aquatic Rain to face off against villains including Dr. Accident, Metajester and Mechanical Rot.
And of course we had to have cute animal sidekicks: wealthy fat cat Barnabas Whiskers, cheerful bird pal with thumbs Beewot Brad, and Legfish, a fish with legs. (In our defense, we were tired; a fish sidekick without legs is boring anyway, right?)
As players make their way through the game, we decided, they would begin finding “errors” that seemed more like messages. Soon, it would become obvious that another character in the “real world” was using the game to reach out to the players for help.
That’s when the work began in earnest. With “Let’s Play” walkthroughs of various games on in the background for inspiration, Susan and Cheryl began furiously producing the art we’d need for the game while Jenny and I worked to find sound effects, write dialogue and watch as JT organized the game, scene by scene through the Construct game editor.
We weren’t the only team hard at work. A Lodi boy and his dad spent the weekend learning how to create a platform game called “Escape” (pronounced “Ess-cah-pay”), where they tried to outrun a plague, jumping over obstacles and dodging zombies.
And at more than 800 sites around the world, others were doing the same. A few of the hundreds of games that came out of the jam:
• An eight-person team at the Savannah College of Art and Design came up with “Vacancy,” where the player tries to solve puzzles and escape a hotel using a radio that can pick up inter-dimensional transmissions.
• A trio from Sydney, Australia, offered up “a constant sea,” where players try to communicate with a space-faring loved one over lightyears and years of time.
• “CATRANS Mission,” created by a pair of developers in Lodzki, Poland, involves throwing cats through teleporter devices to transmit them to new locations.
• “Toward Light,” about electron transmission, and “Happy Waves,” about defeating sadness by transmitting waves of happiness, were created by a pair of all-female teams in Herat, Afghanistan.
• A team in Kampala, Uganda came up with “Mama Wars,” where a team of mothers and pregnant women must come together to defeat malaria-carrying mosquitoes before they spread an illness that harms unborn babies.
There was something really cool about being part of a truly global movement, in which people all over the world were exploring just what “transmission” means, and how to translate that understanding into a fun, creative game.
With the guidance of the Bhaktas and under the watchful eye of library program coordinator Yvette Herrera and her husband, Andy, we spent hour after hour frantically putting together a short, demo version of our story.
We didn’t finish our game — a full visual novel can take months or even years to develop, even when you have a mascot like Legfish and the help of a pair of veteran game designers. But we did outline the first several scenes, design a bunch of characters, come up with the basic game mechanics and begin to get a handle on how our story would develop.
And the Global Game Jam was never about finishing a game. Organizers encourage collaboration, creativity, networking, and coming together to continue working on your project after the jam is over. We definitely plan to keep working on “Heroes of Kirbyville.”
Maybe we’ll even play with a few of the other ideas we discarded as too complicated for the 48-hour event. But not until we’ve caught up on our sleep.