GlobalGameJam report (from an audio point of view)

First Global Game Jam of the history of mankind, glad to have been part of that event. 48 hours doing games.

Where: Mekensleep HQ Rosier street Paris.

When: Friday to Sunday last week.

With: A bunch of nice, talented and crazy people.

Constraints:

I- A complete play session must always last 5 minutes or less.

II- The theme of the game should be “As long as we have each other, we will never run out of problems.”

A third constraint was introduced with a variation for each time zone. In France we had:

III- Choose ONE of the following adjectives to incorporate in your game (each team chooses which one to use): developing, falsifying or trapped.

After a democratic filtering system of everyone game design ideas we eventually started to do games. Three.

Sound and audio ressources were in fact well represented with Jean, an electronic music artist and designer tasting the game experience and Xavier young composer and god of the musical cell. Plus my humble self doing audio fxs, giving advices and trying to balance ideas, cheerleading coders (they’re my heroes I’m a nerd ok?) eating and of course enjoying.

Plus on the three games made, one was a rhythm based game. A keyboard driven waltz rhythm game even.

On this game, I realized that even with a core gameplay mechanic around audio visuals were possibly still an issue: not in their volume but in their capacity to be efficient from a game design point of view, derivated from how the sound is detected and implemented. Add the fact that all of this is dynamically moving.

Yeah gamedev is that kind of brainfuck.

We struggled a lot around this and Olivier‘s advices were really precious and I would retain that: don’t overprotect your core challenge!

I found myself witnessing how -once again- audio was a truly strong glue between the visual representation and the game design. Without sound, a game losts a lot especially the first time you try it. Or more positively, sound truly enhances the feeling and joy of playing a game. And it’s damn cheap to produce and integrate so by making a game in that limited time, audio stands out and is even more a must-have.

The “effectiveness-quality/time to produce-time to tweak” ratio is far better than for visuals when polishing. There’s no friction with coders and game designers because they most of the time don’t know shit about music compared with graphic art where they always have something to say.

Plus you can blindtest people with songs from your game ten or twenty years later, suck it pictures :)

With two visual designers (as I call them, artists as we say in the industry) we couldn’t afford ideas which would require a lot of graphic assets anyway. Sound easily gaped the lack.

We don’t really feel it with casual web games it’s just that in flash audio compression is often badly used. With a release and an executable you can feel the huge audio difference in achievement and tightness. I love it.

Overall it was a rich and full experience. The jam is in my opinion one the best social, collaborative competition process you can imagine.

Jam session definition:

“A jam session is a musical act where musicians gather and play (or “jam”) without extensive preparation or predefined arrangements; improvisation.Jam sessions are often used to develop new material, find suitable arrangements, or simply as a social gathering and communal practice session. Jam sessions may be based upon existing songs or forms, may be loosely based on an agreed chord progression or chart suggested by one participant, or may be wholly improvisational. Jam sessions can range from very loose gatherings of amateurs to sophisticated improvised recording sessions intended to be edited and released to the public.”

We did both! See you next year guys girls and new challengers!

100% success rate We made izzzzzZZZzzzzzzz….