Written by Happy
From 12th Sept. to 22nd, I joined a game jam team mainly formed by Cohort 19 students at CDM. During this period, we collaborated well and managed to create an auto-scrolling 2D platformer with eye-catching graphics and engaging music. I am so proud that we achieved most of the expected results with high quality before the deadline, despite various challenges. Since it has been a while since the end of the event, I believe it is a good time to take a step back from the joy of success and reflect on how I can do projects better in the future.
The first thing we could improve is the brainstorming process. In this project, we didn’t use any specific brainstorming tool but started discussion directly without any preparation in advance. As a result, we didn’t make any progress until two and a half days in. A few days later, I took a class on Production Team Skills led by Jason on how to generate ideas quickly. After the class, I gradually realized that we could have saved more time with a proper approach. Through hands-on practice of generating ideas for interactive narratives, we learned that discussion is a better process to narrow down the scope but not to generate ideas, since we spent a lot of time exchanging our views during discussions, which distracted us from idea generation. A better way could be that every team member thinks individually and generates a specified number of ideas in a fixed time before the discussion. In this way, we can stop judging whether the idea is good or not and focus on generating ideas as fast as possible. After that, we can review them without suppressing inspiration during discussions.
Another lesson we learned from the game jam project is that we should try our best to keep everyone on the same page. There were cases where the level designer changed the design documentation by deleting or modifying some features because of time limits or technical challenges, but the graphic and audio designers didn’t follow up accordingly, resulting in them spending time on assets that would not be used in the final project. All of us in the team know we can do better, as we barely had any idea about Agile or scrum during the process. From Aida’s class, I learned that there are stand-up meetings: every working day in a sprint, everyone shares what they have done and what they are going to do. If we had introduced this process into our teamwork, we could have kept everyone updated to avoid wasting time and effort.
In summary, through our experience in the game jam, we not only created a brilliant game through collaboration but also recognized some areas for potential improvement. I am deeply convinced that knowledge from classes and experience in projects with teammates are both great treasures for our work efficiency and career growth. If anyone is interested in our game, please check the link here: Lumina’s Shadow Journey.