 Hey everyone, thanks for joining me this morning and to listen to me talking about game dance This is a topic. I'm very excited about and I hope to share some of that excitement with all of you I'm then we I sometimes do things like making open source logos for software projects or communities I like to do pixel art for example Sometimes I make these non-verbal assembly instructions to explain algorithms and sometimes You might have seen some people walking around with this huck and shirt with some puns on some band names on them and Another thing I like to do is making very very tiny video games I Also want to learn about you. Who of you is generally interested in making video games yourself That's a lot of hands and that's also that you're here Who of those has actually started to make a video game? That is maybe half or one-third of you. Okay, and who of those has finished to make that video game also I See maybe Four hands, which are left. Okay, so this talk is for those of you Like I was in the same situation, right? I always would start making video games and then I would get kind of stuck halfway and it would be frustrating And then I would have half the game. Huh, so when I found game gems I found that it was an awesome opportunity to actually like force yourself to actually make a Finished game and ship it in the end, which feels really really good My goals for this talk are three-fold I want to explain to you what game gems are and where they come from I want to showcase some of the games I did and like give you a little bit the peak behind the scenes of one of them to see To let you to show you how it was created and most importantly I want to empower all of you to actually participate yourself in one of these and Make it as easy for you as I can to get started Sounds good So what actually is this thing called game jam A very short way to put it. It's a heck of fun for video games So like you have a weekend basically you're given a theme and then alone or in a team You make a video game around that theme and in the end there might be Prices or ratings or something like that, but there doesn't have to be The name game jam this jam component comes from jazz music actually So like in a jam session musicians would meet very spontaneously and like informally to Make music together without a lot of preparation and game gems are kind of in a similar spirit So the first game jam the internet at least knows of was the indie game jam which happened in 2002 To independent video game developers Chris hacker and Sean Barrett Invited some friends to their offers basically And gave them in this case a pre-made engine and invited all of these people to make their own games around that and at the end they put the results on a website and like put some documentation on and This format was really really successful One of the participants in this indie game jam was Jonathan blow, but you might know from games like Braid or the witness for example, which he made later So many people really like that format so only one month later in April 2002 Another person put up a website called Ludum Dare.com Which was another game jam and in this case is this is a virtual game jam So you don't actually go to a common location to participate, but you can participate from anywhere basically and Yeah, the very first Ludum Dare game jam was really small They had about 18 they had exactly 18 submissions so 18 games were submitted and Today's Ludum Dare games have about two thousand to three thousand submissions So it has grown a lot and it has kept going since 2002 There is a long-going debate on how to pronounce this name Some people like to say Ludum Dare and while it's certainly a very daring thing to participate in the game them this is Latin and Then it means to give the game basically or more idiomatically to play a trick on someone And I really really like the atmosphere of this Ludum Dare event It's very very open for beginners for example. It's very supportive I really enjoy how people interact in their community so I can recommend it I have a lot of experience in joining this this game jam I think I found it two or three years ago and I liked it so much that I since then participated ten times in a row by now It happens two or three times a year Um So I said you're given a theme right for these games I'm seriously list of all the Ludum Dare themes so far and many of them put some creative Restrictions on your game design for example one of the themes was ten seconds right one of them was Entire game on one screen and in that case you have to like yeah somehow Think of an idea that fits this theme. That's at least the idea I Think when I first started out the first theme I saw was two button controls So you have to think of a control scheme based on that Yeah, Ludum Dare is considered to be the second largest game them into world So let's look at the largest one, which is the global game jam it happens in the beginning of each year and It has been going since 2009. So it's a bit of a new one and It's yeah, it's driven by a non-profit charity And in this case, it's a distributed game them So you have all over the world several sites where you can go to participate and to meet other game creators So in the in the first global game them they had 1600 participants which created together about 300 games and in the most recent one this year they had 50,000 participants who created 9,000 games and 860 locations all over the world when I looked at this map which they have on the website. I Found this site in the Pacific Ocean and this is actually Hawaii where apparently 56 people also participated in this game jam So here's the list of the game jam themes These are often a bit more vague and more open to interpretation like in 2012 There was just an image of a snake eating its own tail and you had to think of a game That's fit that or the year after that the sound of her heartbeat for example So some other game gems to note are the Nordic game jam Which happens annually in Copenhagen. This is actually a single site where you go to and about 1,000 people participated here You actually need tickets for that, but they do talks and workshops and so on There was the Toad Jam, which happens in Toronto each spring and GitHub sponsors a game. I'm called a game off Which is kind of a celebration of open source software So you're encouraged to create your full game using open source software only and The last one I wanted to mention is the game gem organized by a popular YouTube channel called game makers toolkit Which is focused around game design and game mechanics and they have been doing game gems since two years Which were hugely popular like this year They had also about 3,000 entries, which is awesome And this is much more focused like less focused on a polished game So it's less about the graphics and the the audio, but it's about really clever game mechanics Sometimes these games get developed further after games and so there are some popular commercial games Which you might have heard of which started as game them games For example, Baba is you was an entry to the Nordic game them two years ago to the theme of not there Or mini metro for example was a Ludum Dara entry a few years ago around the theme of minimalism And you might have seen a game called keep talking nobody explodes. There was a global games. I'm entry Okay, so let me show you some games. I made and sell the story of one of them the first entry I made was Like a solo entry it was a theme of shapeshift and they had this little story where like a fairy would give you the ability to Shapeshift, but what the fair we didn't tell you that you shape shift into the closest object to you So congratulations, you were a floor lamp now And the game is then about like moving around at this lamp and zapping little fireflies which then fall down to the carpet and You are supposed to lure a mouse coming out of the mousehole to eat all the cheese on the ground So it's a gamer bond fast reactions and a bit of strategic planning Um Together with the point I made 20,000 pixels into the sea which is a sailing simulator basically So this was actually really interesting for us to learn about how sailboats work and how to put your sail in the correct direction to Go into like go against the wind for example. How you do that and we were stumped for about an hour or so finding out Trying to find out how a boat actually turns how that works Which forces are involved until we realized that you have rudders which yeah help a lot in steering I guess and after we added that it worked much better We made a puzzle game called you remember this German meme was this does for I'm so this is what is that's fine room? and It's a it's a puzzle game basically We are given amount of furniture and you're supposed to put it on the on the floor plan So that you satisfy some conditions For example, you cannot block the door and you couldn't cannot put shelves in front of windows. So you don't block the light We made some interesting Interesting levels around that I think There was a racing game called a bloody small world Which like takes place in the human bloodstream and you are supposed to deliver oxygen to organs of a human body Which is partially very hectic and partially a very meditative experience sorts I'm at ten little letters, which is a very abstract minimalist game about finding out About the shape of letters a bit by basically touching them in the dark and then you get sound feedback and I only had a single day to make this game. So yeah, it's very reduced the idea is very very small and During the game you mostly see this black square and click around in it. That's also fun We made spring clean do not cross which is about Cleaning your apartment with a room bar, but also you have cats and you need to protect your cats from this room bar by Putting in some barrier tapes. So it's about fast reactions again Another game is called splendid adventures on a Sunday afternoon and this was for the theme Combined to incompatible genres. So this is a mixture between a platformer and a text adventure Basically, you'd actually jump over the text to get to places and then you can decide which direction you want to go We're the very talented artists who do these nice back ones in Artists and artifacts you manufacture some sculptures according to your customer's wishes basically It's a bit of a sandbox game. I would say and The most recent one was called capitalist piggies Which is all about looing evil banker piggies into traps by putting coins somewhere and they will eat it and grow and And the game I want to talk to you more about is called right to space we met this last year followed on Dara and Basically the process how it all starts is with a theme announcement, right? So you don't Dara has this Twitter account They also will put the theme on their website and if you're subscribed to the mailing list They will also announce it there so you can't miss it and in this case the theme was running out of space the announcement happens at Zero UTC so in this time zone is deep in the night We were sleeping then I guess and then we meet in the morning to have breakfast and start to brainstorm what we could do with the theme and I want to show you some of the ideas we had for example running out of space the first thing we thought about was hard disks, right? So there are some incoming files and you need to keep your your hard drive Clean basically and decide if you want to keep a video of your summer vacation or the school essay and maybe throw out the virus or something We had the idea of making a mixture between Scrabble and Tetris maybe right so if you create an English word and you're playing field it will disappear Or something about the plant growing roots and it's kind of constricted in the in the space it has This was an idea about like geometric packing right you're giving a number of objects And you want to fit it all into your luggage which might have been fun But then we had to this idea about a game where you have a square grid filled with letters and Also as a playing character you move by typing basically so each time you press a letter This character moves one space to the right and then as soon as you type some special keywords some stuff will happen For example, if you type down your movement direction will change and he will actually start moving downwards And this very first idea we had Yeah the idea to add more items like boxes and holes and keys and in the end we Dropped these more complicated mechanisms and only kept the directional commands and Funnout that this was also very very rich of an idea already So after we thought okay, this might be interesting. We often start by making a very quick ugly prototype So this is how it looked like we we use some graphics we had from an earlier game and basically tried out making some levels and So how that felt like? The advantage of having Letters as your level was that we didn't need a fancy level editor or something we could just use them right to make our levels Which was good Yeah, and then I think we spent the next day Thinking of good levels and this was one of the phases. I enjoyed most in this game Jim, I think like we had this simple rules about Movement and we ourselves had to find out what we could do with him, right? So we found some consequences these rules had on how you can move for example There are some interesting things that happen when you try to turn around in very small corridors And I think we found two or three interesting like revelations which the player can then discover from for themselves Yeah, we had like a kind of playable game at the end of day two or something we had three days in total at That time we invited people to play test. I will talk about that a bit later And after that we just put in time to polish this game At fancy our funds and add very beautiful background graphics and music that fits the game and some sound effects and so on And this is how it looked like in the end And also we ate a lot of pistachios during this game So after you submit your game There's a face where you can play other people's games and comment on them and wait them and We got some pretty encouraging comments for this game Some indie news websites picked it up and reported on them which like made it a bit more visible and many people also liked this effect of having simple rules and complicated consequences of these rules and some other people liked how it looked and a fun thing that happens in the game them often is that some people will Record themselves while they are playing the game, right? They will stream something on Twitch and we caught it in between YouTube later So it's super fun to watch other people playing your game and trying to figure out how it works this person for example Actually did not talk in the stream, but only typed some words into the game itself because right you can write text there basically so The person commented on how they were doing while playing this Yeah, and after three weeks or so the waiting phase closes and then what they do is basically calculate the average score of All the ratings in all categories and then just give you the place in which you are I think in this game them they had about 2,000 submissions or so and These were the the results we got in the end so we made second place overall Which is super surprising to us and we also got very good ratings in the categories fun and innovation If you want to try this game, this is definitely the game. I'm most proud of probably for the games. I made You can check it out here Right and then I want to give you some some tips and tricks I picked up over the years of doing this which might be helpful if you want to do try this for yourself Um First of all, why do I think you should participate? Well, you can probably tell that for me, it's a lot of fun And that's also a very good way to to build skills and train your skills I think both in preparation of the event and also during the event itself You might be forced to learn how to do something you never did before maybe and that's that's also a very valuable thing For me and for me It's super interesting to build interdisciplinary teams also I've been very fortunate to work together with very talented artists for example a person who makes their own music for example and could create background music and Working together in this in this team is a very good experience for me and Yeah, it also always puts me in this flow like state of mind Where I can like work on this game from standing up in the morning to going to bed Which I very rarely experience in other situations though. This is a thing. I always look forward to when participating. I Quickly want to go over the rule sets of Lundar specifically because there are two different rule sets There are the gem rules and the compo rules The gem rules are a bit more forgiving. I would say you can participate in a group and you can Reuse some material other people have made like images and sound effects and so on assuming they have free licenses like right of commons and you have three days to make your game and Then in the other rule set the compo rules that I think this combo comes from the demo scene This is like a test of your skills really you have two days you have to work alone and You have to make everything from scratch during this weekend, which is yeah Which is the 10th Some things I recommend to for preparation is for example to have enough food around Like I mostly cook up a large batch of food and get some snacks and drinks So I don't need to think about that during these days because I will have other things on my mind, right? Yeah, I yeah get enough sleep. I would say I Most often also sleep during the event But I know people are different and yeah, some of you might work night shifts or so and The third thing is to build a small demo game before the event even starts So you get a bit more accustomed to the engine you want to use and you can make sure that all of your group members Have the setup working and that you have like a good setup for example This is a very valuable thing also Yeah, speaking of engines There are some large very powerful engines like unity or the unwheel engine for example But I feel like these are too complex and too powerful maybe to start out So what I recommend is a very small cute 2d game engine called love the url is love 2d org It's open source. It's cross-platform It's very Focused but feature complete for me. It has a physics engine built in for example it has support for graphics haters and The community is also very friendly right the they have very nice forums and if you look at the bottom right it says Be warned however that the community sometimes gets too friendly So look out for that Yeah, another engine I started trying out this year is called pico eight And this is something some people call a fantasy console So it's a piece of software that gives you a very constrained things of Set of things you can work with you have an output of 128 by 128 pixels you have like a fixed color palette of 16 colors You have three audio channels and that's all you have basically and you need to work inside of these constraints To make your game which is for me very like it pushes my creativity forward if I am given these constraints This console also has built-in editors as you can see yes has a level editor It has a built-in code editor also So you can actually stay inside of these software all the time while you are making it and then switch between Playing it and making it all the time you can make sound effects and music also in this in the software This is proprietary however, and if you are looking for an open source alternative I would recommend looking at TIC AT which is basically the same thing the Display is a bit larger. You got a bit more pixels, which I personally don't like as much as technically But you also get a level editor or some editor built-in Okay, so What about making graphics? I have sometimes recommended sites like open game art org where you can find Premade character graphics and sprite sheets and like tiles for making maps and so on But personally I've never used them and I've never seen them successfully used Because often like the idea of your game will be so specific that it's not very helpful to have a Premade graphic or try to find a very specific thing and on some site So I would actually recommend drawing graphics yourself There are at least two good ways of doing that you can use pixel art Which is a way to create graphics very fast right because there are not so many pixels you can change it's it's fast to create a 16 by 16 image for example and a software I recommend of doing that is called ace pride I Sometimes do pixel art workshops and one of them was recorded actually So if you're interested in learning about a sport and about making pixel art you can check out this recording I will give the URL to these lights in the end And the other direction would be Vector graphics I guess we have very sharp defined corners you have a lot of flexibility and which graphics to make and Inkscape is another good open source program for creating vector graphics Yeah, and another idea maybe is if you feel if you don't feel comfortable and making very complex graphics yourself You can keep the visual style of your game very very minimalist and abstract Like constrain yourself to a foreground and a background color work with simple to make shapes for example That's something I've seen working very well in the past To the topic of sound effects the first thing to say is definitely at them I have played a lot of games which had no sound at all and that's always a pity because As soon as you add some sort of extra your actions It's gets so much more fluid and juice more juicy and it's more interesting. So definitely add some sounds I think I like to do is record sound effects myself actually So I would walk around my apartment with my smartphone Maybe the the microphone in there is pretty good And then I would hunt for sound effects like how does this sound and how does my drawn up sound and so on And sometimes you can find very fitting sound effects there are so and if you don't want to do that there are some resources like The free sound project for example, which works pretty good You can enter some keywords and you will most of the time get some fitting sound effects for your game You need an account on this site to download the sound effects, which is kind of annoying, but for me it's worth it Yeah, and then there is a software called SFXR, which is basically a sound effect synthesizer This is kind of a heck this was created specifically for Ludum Dara Because I said in this very constrained rules that you need to create the sound effects on that weekend Right, so some people said, okay, we will make a tool that helps you make the sound effects in that moment So you have these preset buttons on the left and you can click on them and then get some sound effect It sounds like an explosion or like a coin pick up or something And it will randomize the sliders a little bit according to constraints And then you will get something that sounds like a coin pick up Maybe and if you're happy with that you can save it and use it in your game There are some web-based remakes of this software also, which you can find Okay music You could compose it yourself, I guess and I do have a friend who does that a lot for our games But if you're like me, you can also find some very good resources for finding music For example in Competech.com is a very good site where a single person has created hundreds of soundtracks basically in all different styles and tempos and so on and what I really like about that site is that you can Filter it very good So you can actually if you want to evoke a certain feeling with this music you can pick on the fields drop down and then select Don't know bouncy and driving maybe and then you will only see music that fit these feelings You can filter for a tempo for a genre and then pick something you like. This is all quite if common sense so in the brainstorming phase I Always try to make sure that in the beginning We don't exclude any ideas because it's kind of kind of discouraging for people if they like have a very Very very yeah an idea that doesn't sound realistic and other people say are we cannot do that Right, so maybe hold back at that moment a little bit and keep it in mind Maybe it will change over time and become something awesome Mmm, and in the other direction don't pick an idea too quickly in my experience It's often a good idea to like if you have a really awesome idea to brainstorm a little bit about more Above that point and maybe see if you find a second or a third idea What you really like and then you can look at these ideas a bit more distantly and see which one of these are like Because yeah, the core mechanic of the game has to be fun. That's for me one of the most important things Yeah, what about the scope of your game? Make it as small as possible if you have this idea for your game and it involves five different enemy types and ten weapons or something It's often a good idea to remove some of that until only the very very core is left like you get a very very focused idea of your game and You save time doing that in all different directions You need to create less graphics you need to code less interactions between different gameplay elements and so on and it Makes for a much more focused game. I think Regarding playtesting. I found it very helpful to do that in person actually so what we try to do each time is about one day or so before we need to submit our game we would invite some friends to the place where we are making the game and actually sit that person in front of the computer and Just let them play this game without commenting on anything Which is sometimes a helpful way to see if there is something the person does not understand it All right because the game needs to explain this and if other people on the internet will play this There won't be a friendly person sitting beside them and giving them hints so this is a good way to just throwing them in the water and seeing what happens and Doing it in person is helpful for me because you get so much more feedback that way like the channel is very broad compared to a person Only sending your text feedbacks for example over a mail Right you can see their emotions and all of their reactions and their confusions and yeah, there's something I recommend doing that in person So what's next if you are actually interested in making a game yourself? There are some large game times coming up which you can mark in your calendar for example the next little diary is coming up in the beginning of October if you go to this website you can create an account there and Then about two weeks before this actually event happens There is this phase where all the participants decide on a theme themselves You can actually suggest your own themes down and then other people can vote on these themes and Multi-stage process at the end only one theme will be remaining Mmm the next global game gem is coming up next year and the end of January and At that point you can look at this map again Maybe you can find a gem site where you can go in your city or something where you can join other people who are interested in doing that Also create your own gem site I think if you want to do this in your company or something you can register on the site and make it an official Global game gem site. There are certain Restrictions which you need to keep in mind like there needs to be an event coordinator and you need to provide beverage. I think yeah Mmm, if you are kind of impatient and don't wait as long you can also look at this site called Indie game dance comm Which gives you a huge calendar of games I'm going on so yeah, I think today there are at least 20 or 30 games happening at the same time and Yeah, it might be fun too if there's a weekend coming up where you want to make a game You can look on this calendar and pick something you would enjoy There is also another site called itch I o which is like a hosting service for independent video games And they also sometimes organize their own events their own game dance and they have a similar calendar on their side This is only the first third of that calendar because there are so many they didn't fit on on the screen I Once saw a game time on there called bit jam for example Which had the constraint that the output could only be a single bit So it could either be a black screen or a white screen that was the the whole output that was allowed and the challenge was to make an interesting game under these restrictions and People definitely made interesting games like a climbing simulator where you tilted your keyboard to the side And then with your hand climbed up the the keys which was kind of your playing field and the screen would give you feedback if you Fell down or something. Yeah Yeah, then last year I found another side which I really enjoyed another game jam Which is called the one hour game jam So this takes place each Saturday and goes for exactly one hour starting at 20 UTC And then they another theme and you can try to make a game in one hour if you want The way that this works is that at the end of this hour one person will start Streaming the submitted games and as long as the stream is going you can still submit your games So it's often a bit more than one hour that you have available and Then after that I also found another hilarious thing which is called the zero hour game jam Which takes place when shifting the clocks back from daily savings time in autumn so it goes from 2 a.m.. 2 2 a.m.. And People have made games in that time period So if you want you can not only make games in a weekend, but apparently also in no time at all right, so Definitely if you are interested in trying this I would encourage you to That's all I got for today hit me with any questions you might have If you have questions there is an angel with a microphone, is there a question from the internet? Okay Yeah, so I would say Subscribe I was very impressed of what a cool universe and I have to submit here a warm welcome and thanks a lot