To Unstable an Elephant

I recently participated in the Godot Wild Jam, making a game in Godot in nine days.

It was my first game jam, and I had barely gotten started with Godot, but I am pretty happy with the result.

Themes, games and elephants

The theme for the jam was "Unstable", and the game I submitted was To Unstable an Elephant, a game about shoving elephants out of the stables while not shoving the horses out.

As part of this, some lessons were learned.

Lessons

Export and upload early

Last-minute submission is a classic flavor of stress, and one I felt no need to revisit. Uploading early and updating as necessary proved a good choice, especially since exporting for the various platforms proved a bit more fiddly than expected. Doing this early also let me not worry about preparing the game's itch.io as I wrapped up the game the last few evenings.

Small changes can have a big impact (and speed is fun)

Once I had the core gameplay in place, I discovered that the game was... simply boring. However, once I tried increasing the player's movement speed by 150%, the fun started to appear. Moving fast is often fun in games (and life), but the impact of this very simple change was greater than expected. It's a good reminder that simple tweaks to find the right "feel" are invaluable. Not prioritizing this can undermine everything: I also saw someone else mention that in their last jam, they forgot to make a simple update to their movement code, and it completely killed the fun of the game.

Minimal scope helps you both finish and do it well

Since I was pretty much brand new to Godot (and game dev in general), this was not the time to be ambitious. Picking a silly interpretation of the theme felt like enough fanciness, and being unambitious about the rest let me actually finish the game.

Stress is not a welcome participant in this, so "less ambition, more silliness" is a strategy I might reuse.

Short round makes it stay engaging

Each round is 30 seconds. I picked this because the game has almost no content, and would be very boring with anything longer than very short, but I seem to have stumbled into a good balance. With the minimal cost of "one more round", quite a few people (including my boss!) seemed to have a hard time stopping themselves from hitting the "replay" button.

Silly details can bring unexpected value

In the "game over" screen, I added some silly comments by the player's score – one comment for each score from -4 to 20 or so. I did this for fun because I like such details in games, but had no further "plan" for the feature. When a friend of mine tried the game, he said he tried it many times just to see the different score comments he could get. When a streamer played the jam's games, he did the same. The silly comments supported the replay loop the short rounds (and replay hotkey) facilitated, though it was not at all something I had thought about. It may also have helped that one typically gets pretty low scores the first few times, and the comments for those scores leave the player rather unsatisfied with the result.

The same screen also provided a random tip for how to play, though I'm not sure if it had any effect or not.

Don't push bedtime too much

Though the jam was stress-free for me, that didn't stop me from working a little too late most nights. Considering my usual bedtime, this was hardly anything unreasonable, but I could still have used the sleep. If I know I can join game jams with basically zero "side effects", it's easier for me to do so. I should go to bed as normal during future jams. Cut scope, don't push time.