The Legend´s End Windows game

0 comments by PiotrMi on Jun 20th, 2012

When you are a little bit more into Indie games you may have noticed the 7DFPS game jam. It´s topic was to create a First-Person-Shooter within 7 days. On the blog you could post your project updates, screens and more. This jam made quite a bit of splash. Many notable indie devs participated in it.

Because so many people were talking about this I wanted to participate too. Not because I wanted to become super rich and famous within 7 days of production time but more because I had an interesting idea. So I invited two friends of me to join me in this process. One music guy and one level designer.

The start was unusually good! I put together some prototype things in UDK and posted my idea to the blog. The next day I found a comment from jwaaap (!) on my blog post. He liked the idea and wished us luck. We became motivated that this will turn to something great.

But soon we realized that it won´t be as simple. We are going to school. And after school we want to do other things and not only game development. So on every of these days we worked only one hour on the game.

You may think that this can´t happen to you. But you need to see it from another perspective. When you watch the new blog posts on the site the most things you see are some tech demos of small 3d engines made by individuals. They never turn out into a game. After a little bit of coding they have no joy proceeding with it.

The next blog posts I made weren´t really noticed. I´m sure it´s because the result was a reflection of our low motivation. After a certain time we saw that there is no chance we could finish the game in time. Oh okay that is not true. We can finish it when we don´t look at polishing.

Some videos and blog posts later the project was „finished". I built it and submitted it to the jam site. A few minutes later I noticed some big bugs. It was too late to update. And I even hadn´t the motivation. Jam games are nice and quick. But their development isn´t. The games of the known developers all weren´t finished and continued later after the contest. Only a few really good games did it. The only things that I did as „post production" was to track some stats.

90 Downloads
5 Videos made
4 Posts made
1 Project Site
Real dev time: estm. 6 hours

Comments:
Total comments: 5-7 (I couldn´t find every comment)
Negative: 2
Mixed: 2
Positive: 1 (even from jwaaaap)

Conclusion:
While it´s a nice feeling participating at game jams the things you get are almost zero. Your game idea is even for you not really important and you don´t care about quality too much. Nevertheless you gain development experience with that. So you shouldn´t don´t participate in jams. It´s nice and when you want to get some experience in development it´s really great.