How to find time to do a game jam

How to find time to do a game jam?

I recently participated in the Brackeys Game Jam on Itch.io. It felt nice to get back into game development and to not work with any AI tools. But it reminded me of how I got started in game development.

Back in February 2015 my 15 year old son approached me about making games. He had found a game jam called Ludum Dare and want to make a video game. I read up on it and in the Ludum Dare you make a game from scratch over a weekend. For a team you have 72 hours to make the game. That seemed like a very tight schedule. He wanted me to at least watch the Extra Credits video series on game development so that I could get start getting familiar with the topic.

So I told him that we would maybe get to it someday since I was busy with work. (Yeah, yeah…cats in the cradle and all that…I loathe that song…probably because it always hits home.)

So a few weeks pass and I am flying for work somewhere and I discover that my flight is now delayed 3 hours! So…I guess I have time to watch the Extra Credits videos at least. No excuses now. The universe just handed me 3 hours. So I started watching them.

Those videos were so inspiring! Ever since I was a kid playing on our ColecoVision and Commodore 64 I wanted to make video games. I thought when I grew up, for sure I would do that. But then I became an adult and now I do “grownup programming”. Sigh. Just seemed to never have the time.

But the nice thing about doing a game in a weekend is…it’s only a weekend. That’s not a huge time commitment. I can do this! So I talked with one of my game developer friends and he recommended that I learn Unity3D. So I found a Unity book and began reading. I then found the Brackeys Youtube channel and learned how to make a simple platformer. Armed with this knowledge I set my sights on making a game for Ludum Dare 32.

The Friday night of the Ludum Dare was upon us, and we set ourselves up at our local maker space. (I had no idea how important that was going to be later.). We waited for the theme and my 15 year old and my 19 year old helped me out, doing some of the programming, art and music and design for our little game: Destroy the Band!. It was great! 60 hours later we had a somewhat working game. It was playable and complete.

This inspired me to continue to do Ludum Dare game jams. I don’t think we missed one for many years. Over time we got more and more people to be part of our team. One of them went on to create a game company!

When the pandemic hit, it got us out of our game jam rhythm and before we knew it, it had been well over a year since we last made a game. So I’m super glad to be back to doing this again.