6 Mistakes To Avoid In Your First Game Jam

I’ve had the opportunity to participate in six different game jams at this point, and while it’s been a great experience, I’ve definitely made mistakes or looked back and thought “I really should have approached that differently.” Here are six tips and tricks that I wish I knew about game jams when I started my first:

1. Version Control
   Even if you’re working by yourself, downloading GitHub Desktop and setting up a repo for your game will save you a lot of time. It gives you the ability to save a working “checkpoint” of the game, which means you can revert to it if something breaks and you’re not sure how to fix it. 

2. Conservative Scoping
   Scope as though you're going to lose at least 1 team member. Things come up unexpectedly and teammates will have less time than they expected. It’s much better to end up with a smaller game with extra time for polish than it is to run out of time and end up with unfinished major features.

3. Leave Time for Polish
   Players have a lot of options for games to play when judging a jam, and a lack of polish can drive people away from an otherwise good game. Plan to finish the game well before the deadline and spend the remaining time fixing bugs and making the game feel good so that people stay engaged for the full experience.

4. Designated Submitter
   Read the jam submission instructions thoroughly, and designate a person to submit the game. I recently finished a jam where over 100 teams that finished games were disqualified for mistakes when submitting. Doing all the hard work of putting a game together and not being able to participate is not how anybody wants a jam to end up.

5. Browser Playability
   If you want to get more than a handful of plays of your game, make it run in the browser. "Download and run this sketchy unverified code on your computer" is a much bigger ask than "click play". In my experience, you cut your audience approximately in half if the game needs to be downloaded to be played.

6. Early Upload & Testing
   Get a working version of the game, including basic functionality like menus, pausing, and restarting. Build it and make sure it runs the way you want it wherever you're going to be hosting the final submission. Your game might work just fine in the editor, but moving to the browser introduces another opportunity for bugs and issues that you don’t want to find out at the last minute.

Keeping these things in mind, you should have a much easier time with your first game jam!