Preparation

Before we knew what the theme would be for Brackey’s Game Jam 2025.1, we were already preparing for the challenge by reviewing our “lessons learned” from the previous one (Brackey’s Game Jam 2024.2) That was our first time ever participating in a game jam – and we learned some hard, but valuable lessons.

In our first game jam, there were 1,486 entries and the theme was: Calm Before The Storm. The game we created and submitted was called Deadly Tides. It’s a 3D subterranean mining game where the player harvests valuable resources from caves and must avoid being trapped by the rising deadly tide when it comes in. Our submission failed to gain enough ratings to be considered competitive and at the end, our overall rank was #1,341 out of 1,486. Ouch. The minimum number of ratings required to meet the initial cut is 20… and we only had 5.

Why did our first submission perform so poorly?

When looking at the abysmally low number of ratings, the biggest lesson we learned was this: the game MUST be playable in the browser. Why? Because the ratings come from other game jam participants only… and most of them WILL NOT take the time to download/install a game that they don’t know if they will like. Since ratings come from other participants, that means you’re more likely to get a lot of ratings if you are making an effort to play and rate as many games as possible. It wastes too much time to download and unzip/install games you’re only going to play for a few minutes.

Deadly Tides was NOT playable in the browser. After the first 24 hours of the rating period passed, we realized how much that was going to impact our ability to earn ratings, so we started scrambling to prepare a browser build for our game. When we prepared our file for export, we found that the resulting game was broken and unplayable…. Several of the caves were missing their meshes, leaving gaping holes in the map and the lighting was all wrong. There was not enough time left to rebuild the parts of the map that were missing to conform to the lower requirements needed for browser compatible exports. So we had to accept the harsh reality and cut our losses.

While the lack of browser support was likely our BIGGEST downfall, there were other issues with our submission that probably would have kept us in the lower ranks even if we had managed to get that situation fixed. We submitted our project less than 13 minutes before the deadline. If you’re wondering why we waited until the last minute… well, that’s a valid question! We submitted at the last minute because we were crunching hard to even meet the deadline. And when you crunch and rush to the finish, that usually results in errors. Our project had many issues that we only discovered AFTER we submitted it. How did we miss them? The short answer is: we didn’t have any outside playtesters to help us QC our game before the deadline. That led to us only learning about major bugs from the frustrated raters that took the time to download our file. We scrambled to fix bugs and update our file, crossing our fingers that we might get a second chance… but it was too late to entice other raters to try our game at that point. There’s a window of opportunity at the beginning of the rating period, where the majority of participants will dedicate a handful of hours playing others’ games for reciprocal participation. After that, people have to get back to their normal lives and the “rate 4 rate” activity dwindles.

We arrived at our new home. Found that there was much work to be done and set about prioritizing the work to be done. Then we began the process of improving our home for ourselves. We were also met with a tragety in our family as a close family member passed away. It has taken nearly a half year to return daily life to normal since this event. Pat you will forever be missed.

How did we end up with a game that wasn’t even fun to play?

When we did our brainstorming and planning for Deadly Tides, we probably (definitely) overestimated our capabilities. We knew from the start that we were creating a 3D game – in 7 days… from scratch. Nearly everything in the game was created within that 7 days (except the player character asset from another source and the music, which is mine, but was not created specifically for the game.) That meant the entire set, which was modeled in Blender, the resources the player would collect, the monsters that try to push the player off the platforms, the hand-drawn art used as textures and foliage, etc. needed to be created while also simultaneously coding the underlying systems and mechanics, and the UI required for actual gameplay. We pushed our capabilities to the limits and left no wiggle room at the end for making adjustments.

In our preparation for Brackey’s Game Jam 2025.1, we addressed our biggest reasons for failure as part of the planning process. Our new goals included: 1. Design with browser limitations in mind from the beginning and aim for a browser build FIRST – even if it results in the ONLY option to play by submission time. 2. Enlist outside playtesters to play the game all the way to the end, so they can help us find bugs early and make the final product as playable as possible. 3. Turn in the submission well BEFORE the deadline! (That would leave us with plenty of time and mental energy to quickly tackle early bugs during the 48-hour grace period.)

Next

In the next article, which will be after the rating period is over for Brackey’s Game Jam 2025.1, we will be adding new “lessons learned” from this recent experience. Our goal is to make sure we can prevent repeating the same mistakes by tracking new lessons over multiple projects. If we can help other game developers learn from our mistakes, too, all the better! I can already say that our second game jam project was substantially better than the first. Will we win? Unlikely, but that is okay… and only time will tell.