I made a videogame

So… I made a videogame. It’s a crappy videogame but it’s a videogame and you can play it. I made it for Wizard Jam 4, a game jam from the Idle Thumbs community where you have two weeks to make a game inspired by the title of one of the episode of the Idle Thumbs podcast. It’s a two player game played on a single keyboard. Letters appear on two sides of the screen, if you hold down the letters that appear on your side of the screen faster than the other player, you get a point. Get enough points and you win. Pretty simple but after making several clones of Pong and a pile of unfinished ideas, it feels good to complete something that has a beginning and an end. It’s here, if you want to give it a try: https://zzot.itch.io/dead-letters If you are somewhat interested in what goes behind making a game, here are few thing I learned along the way (they are probably way more interesting than the game). This was my first game jam, but it’s definitely not going to be my last. * It seems obvious but building with a community changes everything. The Idle Thumbs listeners are a bunch of nice people and working in parallel with a lot of people that share the same goal as you is an incredible feeling. I could feel the momentum, and in the Idle Thumbs Slack channel dedicated to the Wizard Jam you could see people stuck on problems, people asking for help, people changing their games on the fly and, in general, just games turning from barely playable concepts to fully developed things. We have a myth of the lonely genius but it’s a false myth. We both do better things and do things better when we bounce ideas and support each other. * I aimed for the lowest of the lowest hanging fruits. And even that was challenging. Game design is messy and game development is messy. A normal match in my game lasts for 30 seconds or less. My game core mechanic is also its only mechanic. Despite that, building the game, the menus, the interaction, took a long long time. I started building a prototype for the game in an environment that I know well but that is not designed to create games… but toward the end of the first week I panicked and decided to go all-in and develop the whole game in that environment. Bad idea, of course. My only excuse: my main goal of this jam wasn’t to make a good game, just to make a game. There will be time to learn and time to improve, this time I wanted to finish and publish something. * The biggest consequence of turning a prototype into the game I was developing is that I increased resolution too fast. Another classic mistake. A thing I was using only to test if the game was actually fun, became the thing that was supposed to be fun. I managed to still tweak the game and the mechanics a bit, but my efforts turned too quickly to everything that sits around the core mechanic: explaining players how to play the game, adjusting the style of the game until it looked decent, ensuring that the game has a menu, ensuring that the game has a end, ensuring that the game can actually be played on other people’s computers… I did some play testing but not nearly enough and not at the right time. Next time! * Sound is so incredibly powerful. My initial idea was to create a fun and fast Twister-style game, where two players have to stretch their fingers on the keyboard to win. However, as soon as I started adding sounds the game completely turned into something else. I used a library that generates sounds on the fly and I based the sounds on the key code of the letters that the players where pressing. The default sounds generated by the library however, were not what I expected. They were… spooky. Way too spooky for the game I wanted to make. Sound is not my thing and I did not enough time to figure out how to create something that wasn’t standard with the library so… I went with it. I tweaked the colour palette of the game, the copy and the typography to match the spooky atmosphere. Not sure if it works but it’s… interesting? Now I know how important sound it. Another lesson learned. And tomorrow, we begin the second game.