Hey !

I'm Darenn the developer behind BBB: Boost Boom Boots, that won the Developer's Choice Award during the Score Space Jam #9. The game was made in 72 hours with the help of Sol ROO for the sprites and tiles.

In this post, I will explain how I've created BBB, hoping it will help you for your future game jams.

Here are the 11 things you should  keep from this post :

1. Think of the games you want to make before the jam.
2. Get to know all the tools you want to use.
3. Prepare your team ahead of the jam.
4. Create a game jam template project you will improve and  use at each jam.
5. Find the concept quickly, you do not need the whole game from the start.
6. Make a simple prototype quickly, then use it to iterate a few times on the design.
7. Define the art style, world and story together and  just after you got your prototype working.
8. Plan your jam, to be sure you will have time to make everything.
9. Stick to your planning, be clever about where you can gain time.
10. Get and give feedback in a constructive manner.
11. Write a post-mortem, get better. 

Before the jam starts

Think beforehand

Try to get an idea of the kind of game you would like to make. A tactical? A game with Pink Elephants in it? A game with a very nice presentation? A game playable on mobile/vr? It will help when searching for an idea, you'll feel more ready. Also don't hesitate to read design articles/watch design videos beforehand. 

For example in this jam I watched a lot of videos avout scoring systems and game juice. My intent was to make a really simple game (one button) playable on mobile, that could be played by casuals and also hardcore gamers. But most of all, I really wanted to work on the juice of the game, something that I usually neglect but feel very important.

Get to know your tools

Jams are great for learning, but if you want to have the time to work on the game, you need to know what you're doing. It was my 3rd game jam with Godot, I really learned a lot during the two first ones and trained between them. But still my lack of knowledge still made me loose A LOT of precious time.

Prepare a template project

The goal of a jam is to create the game during the jam, but you can't possibly go from scratch. Most of us will use a game engine instead of coding directly with a Multimedia library. Some of the engine come with more or less prefabricated things. Unreal has a lot for 3D FPS templates,  Game Maker has a lot of 2D mechanics already implemented. So no, you're not coding everything during the jam, you're using pre-existing code and coding the logic of the game. 

The more you will jam the more you will see things that could be usefull to keep for next jams. For example for this jam with Godot, I've already coded the splash screen, I reused an existing CRT Shader, and the screen shake was also already implemented. This way you only have to setup and not implement everything during the jam. I suggest you create a "jam_template" project in your engine of choice. Use it at it each jam, and add things to it. In the end this is what will make the difference in speed between jammers, with more experience you'll be very efficient with your tools, and will have a big template project you master with a lot of things preconfigured to gain time. Don't forget to use VCS like git, it allows you to restore your project at a specific version, in case you broke something.

Prepare your team

Sync with your team if you have one. Get to know the strengths and weaknesses of each one of them and decide together who will do what. You also really need to get a common goal, some just want fun, other want to learn, others want to train, others want to win. If you have someone that want to win with someone that want to learn, there might be some problems. 

For this jam, I was starting the jam alone, then a friend of mine Sol ROO proposed to help for pixel art, he could work 1 day out the three. I accepted right away, knowing the time I would gain with his help, and also knowing that he will certainly make great work. I know it's hard to get a team and finding people you work well and have fun with. But try to do it, because of course your game will be better. I'm confident BBB would not have won without the art style of Sol ROO, his advice on design and his beautiful game cover.

Also, I've made a conversation with lots of friends ready to give feedback and test. It was very important for me to balance the game. During the jam, i've sent them around 6 builds, always getting useful feedback in the process.

Jam Start

Find the concept

Take time because it's an important step of the jam, but at the same time, don't think too much. Make a mindmap, drawn things, reuse old ideas, revisit ideas you liked. For this jam I did not want to make a really original game, more an existing one with a small twist. I decided to make a vertical runner (you're climbing) and you will jump from one wall to the other to avoid obstacles. It is actually and idea I've got for another jam I did not do. And that's all, really it was enough, just go prototype it now! It took me about one hour to get the concept and decide.

Create a prototype

I made a first prototype with the concept explained above, in less than an hour, with placeholders. And then, I started designing again. : "Ok so what about pickups for the score? They force you to take a nice trajectory. What about things you have to destroy by jumping when from it to get points? They force you to jump and adapt." I added them one hour later with some screenshakes : the full gameplay was there with already some nice game feel. It's interesting to note that here we have a limited amount of jumps, you have to collect pickup to get new jumps. It was removed later after much thoughts, the game was too strategic and punitive here, against the idea of having a fast-paced game based on reaction speed.

Define the art style and world

Then we defined how will look the game, the color palette, the pixel art style, the vertical parallax, the cyberpunk retrowave vibes. Take some time to do it so that the game is coherent and your artist can work. A thing we did wrong was not thinking of the story while creating the art style, so it was hard finding what would be the pickups, why get them etc (but I think I did a good job of using Sol sprites the best I can with some valid explanations in game, it was a nice challenge). So my advice is to have your story/lore/world already good at this point to avoid problems later.

During the jam

Here we are around 4 hours in the jam (and I already slept around 7 hours). 

Plan your jam

Here is my jam planning :

1. Integrate visual assets (sol worked 1 day one day on the assets, I integrated them as he was drawing them), It took me almost 8 hours, it's a lot of work because you have to create the animations, the tilesets etc. We also had some issues with the resolution that changed during the jam.
2. Polish the feedback, make something juicy. I added slow motion, particles, visuals effects, bloom, crt shader, sfx, UI elements. The idea is to have a fun game to play that looks and feel good already. 
3. Implement some missing things (player that fall, leaderboard, ending, etc).
4. Create the level, and in the process fixed a lot bugs from the prototype.
5. Polish some more, balancing values effects etc from step 2 and trying to make something a bit better.
6. Balance the level/game thanks to player feedback.
7. Some more polish (so important).
8. 2 hours before the jam, I pushed a safe version that would work nice. For the 2 remaining hour I'll only fix bugs or make very little tweaks.
9. Export the game, and polish you game webpage, you need to attract players with nice visuals (avoir big tutorial on the webpage if possible).

The game looked like this at step 2 :

The thing to keep in mind here is that implementing features took around 6 hours maximum, I kept it really simple to avoid being overwhelmed by feedback to create and bugs to fix in every places. On the other side I would say that about half the jam time was used  to polish the game feel and aesthetic. Level design and balancing was made in around 6 hours. All the art was made by Sol in one day, so it was of course a big advantage for me.

Stick to your planning

There is a bug you can't fix? You've already worked 30 minutes on it? If it's an edge case, just drop it. If it is something really important, try to change the design, add more constraints. It might be harder to get interesting levels if you put a lot of contraints but it is worth it believe me.

For example in BBB, if you run out of a building roof, the character will continue running in the air. This was caused by how I implemented the really simple physic of the game. I DID NOT EVEN TRY TO FIX IT. I've just added a level design guideline : put obstacles just before building roofs so that the player can't produce this bug.

After the jam

Get and give feedback 

Get some sleep, play other games, give feedback and enjoy getting feedback. Receiving feedback is hard, I won't talk in detail about it here but I think it's something you will learn with time. A good advice I can give is not trying to justify yourself, just accept any feedback, analyze it and decide if it can be used later. It's useless to argue with someone that does not have the whole picture, did not see everything,  etc... And it's wrong to try to convince him he's wrong on something, if he experienced it it's true, you can't say he did not play the good way. So unless there is a real question, just thank him/her very much for giving precious feedback.

Write a post-mortem to remember and get better

Write a small post mortem, with things to avoid next time, things to do again, or even ideas you got during the jam and could use in the next one. Also note the nice things you've seen in other games that you can use. 

Here's a part of my "upgrade list" for this jam :

• Fade in/out during loadings and screen changes.
• Use a generic explosion system that spawns a node when something is destroyed.
• Create a better generic splash screen with animated text.
• Make an achievement system to increase game replayability and feeling of completion (costly).
• Make it possible to change the theme of the game (set of colors).
• Put clickable link or button to my personnal website.
• Make a parameters menu to set up volumes (music/sfx), or other accessibility options (daltonian, text size, etc...).
• Have a generic sfx player that actually works this time.
• Have credits somewhere in the game.
• Record a playthrough of the game . Can help players understand the game, can create interest for new players, is a quick way to show your game to others.
• Let a discret message to remind feedback is apprciated (sometimes it works).
• Organize a streaming session playing your game but also the others games.
• Publish the game sooner to get more visibility.
• etc...

 Conclusion

Thanks for reading this post.  It's the first time I'm doing it, and I intend to do it again as it helps me as much as you. If you have any feedback about the content or the game, please let me know in comments or DM me. And if it helped you, please let me know too.