Making video games in a weekend
Morr, Sebastian (blinry)
Are you curious about making your own video game? Game jams are a brilliant opportunity to try that, and a fun challenge for interdisciplinary teams of all skill levels! They're basically hackathons, but for video games - you're given a certain theme, and are encouraged to make a game around that in two or three days. In this talk, I want to empower and inspire you to try that yourself! When I first joined in the large, international game jam "Ludum Dare" in 2016, I found it a very rewarding experience, that got me in a flow-like state of mind. I liked it so much that I've since participated 10 times in a row - at this point, I have tons of experience, which I want to share with you! This talk is split into three parts: First, I'll quickly go over the history of game jams, and introduce you to some of the largest ones, like Ludum Dare and the Global Game Jam. Second, I'll talk about my personal experience with game jams: I'll explain how I got into it, and showcase some games I worked on! I'll also share the development process behind them, and reflect on what went well and what didn't. And finally, I want to empower you to try this for yourself. Specifically, I'll explain how the "Ludum Dare" game jam works, and share some tips, tricks, and resources I have assembled over the years, that would have been useful for myself as I just was starting out.
 Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining me this morning 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 Lenri. 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 hot-con 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 genuinely interested in making video games yourself? That's a lot of hands, and that's also in that hero 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. 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 a game. 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 threefold. 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 give you a little bit of a peek behind the scenes of one of them 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 hackathon 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 that 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 office 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 in the end they put the results on a website and put some documentation on, and this format was really, really successful. One of the participants in this indie Game Jam was Jonathan Blow, which you might know from games like Braid or The Witness, for example, which he made later. So many people really liked that format, so only one month later in April 2002, another person put up a website called ludumdare.com, which was another Game Jam, and in this case 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 Game Jam has about 2,000 to 3,000 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 ludumdare, and while it's certainly a very daring thing to participate in the Game Jam, this is Latin, and then it means to give a game, basically, or more idiomatically to play a trick on someone. And I really, really like the atmosphere of this ludumdare 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 Game Jam. I think I found it two or three years ago, and I liked it so much that I since then participated 10 times in a row by now. It happens two or three times a year. So I said you're given a theme for this Game Jam. Here's a list of all the ludumdare themes so far, and many of them put some creative restrictions on your game design. For example, one of the themes was 10 seconds, one of them was an entire game on one screen. And in that case, you have to 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. The ludumdare is considered to be the second largest game in the 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 driven by non-profit charity, and in this case, it's a distributed Game Jam, so you have all over the world several sites where you can go to participate and to meet other game creators. So in the first global Game Jam, they had 1,600 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 a list of the global 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 fit that. Or the year after that, the sound of a 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 is the Toad Jam, which happens in Toronto, each spring. And GitHub sponsors a Game Jam called 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 a Game Jam organized by a popular YouTube channel called Game Maker's 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, less focused on a polished game, so it's less about the graphics and the audio, but it's about really clever game mechanics. Sometimes these games get developed further after a Game Jam, so there are some popular commercial games which you might have heard of, which started as Game Jam games. For example, Baba is You was an entry to the Nordic Game Jam two years ago to the theme of Not There. Or Mini Metro, for example, was a Ludum Dare 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 Game Jam entry. Okay, so let me show you some games I made and tell the story of one of them. The first entry I made was like a solo entry. It was a theme of shapeshift. And it had this little story where a fairy would give you the ability to shapeshift. But what the fairy didn't tell you, that you shapeshifted into the closest object to you. So congratulations, you are a floor lamp now. And the game is then about 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 mouse hole to eat all the cheese on the ground. So it's a game of want. Fast reactions and a bit of strategic planning. Together with the friend I made, 20,000 pixels into the sea, which is a sailing simulator, basically. This was really interesting for us to learn about how sailboats work and how to put your sail in the correct direction to go against the wind, for example, how you do that. And we were stumped for about an hour or so trying to find out how a boat actually turns or that works, which forces unwolfed until we realized that you have rudders, which 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 das das für ein? So this was das das für ein Ruhm. And it's a puzzle game, basically, where you are given a amount of furniture and you are supposed to put it on a floor plan so that you satisfy some conditions. For example, you cannot block the door and you cannot put shelves in front of windows so you don't block the light. We made some interesting levels around that, I think. There was a racing game called a bloody small world, which takes place in the human blood stream 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 made 10 little letters, which is a very abstract minimalist game about finding out the shape of letters 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. That's also fun. You 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 actually jump over the text to get to places and then you can decide which direction you want to go. You had a very talented artist who do these nice backgrounds. In artisan 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 Piggy's, which is all about looing evil banker piggies into traps by putting coins somewhere and they will eat it and grow. And the game I want to talk to you more about is called Right to Space. We made this last year for Ludendara and basically the process, how it all starts is with a theme announcement, right? So Ludendara 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 miss it. And in this case, the theme was running out of space. The announcement happens at zero UTC, so on this time zone it's 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 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 your playing field will disappear or something about the plant growing roots and it's constricted 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 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 key words, some stuff will happen. For example, if you type down, your movement direction will change and you 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 found out 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 used some graphics we had from an earlier game and basically tried out making some levels and saw 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 to make our levels, which was good. 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. We had these simple rules about movement and we ourselves had to find out what we could do with them, 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 revelations which the player can then discover for themselves. We had 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 fancier fonts and at very beautiful background graphics and music that fits the game and 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 is a phase 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 made it a bit more visible. And many people also liked this effect of having simple rules and complicated consequences of these rules. Some other people liked how it looked. And a fun thing that happens in the game is that some people will record themselves while they are playing the game. They will stream something on Twitch and record it and put it on 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 in the game itself because you can write text there, basically. So the person commented on how they were doing while playing this. 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 they had about 2,000 submissions or so. And these were 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, from the games I made. You can check it out here. Right. And then I want to give you some tips and tricks I picked up over the years of doing this which might be helpful if you want to try this for yourself. 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 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 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 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 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 Ludendire 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 Creative Commons and you have three days to make your game. And then in the other rule set, the compo rule set, I think this compo 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 a talent. One thing I recommend for preparation is, for example, to have enough food around. 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 in my mind, right? Get enough sleep, I would say. I most often also sleep during the event, but I know people are different and 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 Unreal 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 love2d.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? They have very nice forums. And if you look at the bottom right, it says BeWant, however, that the community sometimes gets too friendly. So look out for that. Yeah. Another engine I started trying out this year is called Pico8. And this is something some people call a fantasy console. So it's a piece of software that gives you a very constrained set of things you can work with. You have a set of 128 by 128 pixels. You have 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. It has a level editor. It has a built-in code editor also. So you can actually stay inside of this 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 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 get a bit more pixels, which I personally don't like as much aesthetically. But you also get a level editor or sound editor built-in. Okay. So what about making graphics? I have sometimes recommended sites like opengameart.org, where you can find pre-made character graphics and sprite sheets and tiles for making maps and so on. But personally, I have never used them. And I have never seen them successfully used. Because often the idea of your game will be so specific that it's not very helpful to have a pre-made graphic or try to find a very specific thing 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 fast to create a 16 by 16 image, for example. And a software I recommend of doing that is called Asproid. I sometimes do pixel art workshops. And one of them was recorded, actually. So if you're interested in learning about Asproid and about making pixel art, you can check out this recording. I will give a URL to these slides 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 in which graphics to make. And Inkscape is another good open source program for creating vector graphics. And another idea maybe is if you don't feel comfortable in making very complex graphics yourself, you can keep the visual style of your game very minimalist and abstract. Like constrain yourself to a foreground and a background color, work with simple shapes, for example. That's something I've seen working very well in the past. So to the topic of sound effects, the first thing to say is definitely add 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 sound effects to your actions, it gets so much more fluid and more juicy and 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 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 also. And if you don't want to do that, there are some resources like the FreeSound 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 side to download the sound effects, which is kind of annoying, but for me it's worth it. And then there is a software called SFXR, which is basically a sound effect synthesizer. This is kind of a hack. This was created specifically for Ludum Dare, because I said in this very constrained rule set, you need to create the sound effects on that weekend. 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 get some sound effects that sounds like an explosion or like a coin pickup 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 pickup 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, incompetec.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 dropdown and then select 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 a 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 discouraging for people if they have a very, very, very, yeah, an idea that doesn't sound realistic and other people say, ah, we cannot do that. 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. 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 more about that point and maybe see if you find a second or a third idea which you really like and then you can look at these ideas a bit more distantly and see which one of these you like. Because yeah, the core mechanic of the game has to be fun. That's, for me, one of the most important things. Yeah, a word 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 10 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 at all, right? Because the game needs to explain this. 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 you text feedbacks, for example, over a mail. You can see their emotions and all of their reactions and their confusions. And yeah, that'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 Ludum Derry 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 there. And then other people can vote on these themes and a multi-stage process at the end. Only one theme will be remaining. The next global game gem is coming up next year in the end of January. And at that point, you can look at this map again and 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. If you are kind of impatient and don't wait as long, you can also look at this site called IndieGameGams.com. 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 at the game and look at this calendar and pick something you would enjoy. There is also another site called itch.io, which is like a hosting service for independent video games. And they also sometimes organize their own events, their own game gems. And they have a similar calendar on their site. This is only the first third of that calendar because there are so many that didn't fit on the screen. I once saw a game gem on there called BitGem, 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 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 keys, which was kind of your playing field, and the screen would give you feedback if you fell down or something. Then last year I found another site which I really enjoyed, another game gem, which is called the one hour game gem. So this takes place each Saturday and goes for exactly one hour starting at 20 UTC and then they announce a theme. And you can try to make a game in one hour if you want. The way 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 gem which takes place when shifting the clocks back from daily savings time in autumn. So it goes from 2 AM to 2 AM and people have made games in that time period. So if you want, you cannot 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. Welcome and thanks a lot.
 Hey, everyone.  Thanks for joining me this morning 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 Lenri.  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 hot-con 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 genuinely interested in making video games yourself?  That's a lot of hands, and that's also in that hero 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.  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 a game.  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 threefold.  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 give you a little bit of a peek behind  the scenes of one of them 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 hackathon 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 that 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 office 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 in the end they put the results on a website and put some documentation on, and this format  was really, really successful.  One of the participants in this indie Game Jam was Jonathan Blow, which you might know  from games like Braid or The Witness, for example, which he made later.  So many people really liked that format, so only one month later in April 2002, another  person put up a website called ludumdare.com, which was another Game Jam, and in this case  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 Game Jam has about 2,000 to 3,000 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 ludumdare,  and while it's certainly a very daring thing to participate in the Game Jam, this is Latin,  and then it means to give a game, basically, or more idiomatically to play a trick on someone.  And I really, really like the atmosphere of this ludumdare 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 Game Jam.  I think I found it two or three years ago, and I liked it so much that I since then participated  10 times in a row by now.  It happens two or three times a year.  So I said you're given a theme for this Game Jam.  Here's a list of all the ludumdare themes so far, and many of them put some creative  restrictions on your game design.  For example, one of the themes was 10 seconds, one of them was an entire game on one screen.  And in that case, you have to 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.  The ludumdare is considered to be the second largest game in the 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 driven by non-profit charity, and in this case, it's a distributed Game Jam,  so you have all over the world several sites where you can go to participate and to meet  other game creators.  So in the first global Game Jam, they had 1,600 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 a list of the global 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 fit that.  Or the year after that, the sound of a 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 is the Toad Jam, which happens in Toronto, each spring.  And GitHub sponsors a Game Jam called 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 a Game Jam organized by a popular YouTube channel  called Game Maker's 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, less focused on a polished game, so it's less about the  graphics and the audio, but it's about really clever game mechanics.  Sometimes these games get developed further after a Game Jam, so there are some popular  commercial games which you might have heard of, which started as Game Jam games.  For example, Baba is You was an entry to the Nordic Game Jam two years ago to the theme  of Not There.  Or Mini Metro, for example, was a Ludum Dare 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 Game Jam entry.  Okay, so let me show you some games I made and tell the story of one of them.  The first entry I made was like a solo entry.  It was a theme of shapeshift.  And it had this little story where a fairy would give you the ability to shapeshift.  But what the fairy didn't tell you, that you shapeshifted into the closest object to you.  So congratulations, you are a floor lamp now.  And the game is then about 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 mouse hole to eat all the cheese  on the ground.  So it's a game of want.  Fast reactions and a bit of strategic planning.  Together with the friend I made, 20,000 pixels into the sea, which is a sailing simulator,  basically.  This was really interesting for us to learn about how sailboats work and how to put your  sail in the correct direction to go against the wind, for example, how you do that.  And we were stumped for about an hour or so trying to find out how a boat actually turns  or that works, which forces unwolfed until we realized that you have rudders, which 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 das das für ein?  So this was das das für ein Ruhm.  And it's a puzzle game, basically, where you are given a amount of furniture and you are  supposed to put it on a floor plan so that you satisfy some conditions.  For example, you cannot block the door and you cannot put shelves in front of windows  so you don't block the light.  We made some interesting levels around that, I think.  There was a racing game called a bloody small world, which takes place in the human blood  stream 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 made 10 little letters, which is a very abstract minimalist game about finding out  the shape of letters 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.  That's also fun.  You 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 actually jump over the text to get to places and then you can decide which direction  you want to go.  You had a very talented artist who do these nice backgrounds.  In artisan 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 Piggy's, which is all about looing evil banker  piggies into traps by putting coins somewhere and they will eat it and grow.  And the game I want to talk to you more about is called Right to Space.  We made this last year for Ludendara and basically the process, how it all starts is with a theme  announcement, right?  So Ludendara 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 miss it.  And in this case, the theme was running out of space.  The announcement happens at zero UTC, so on this time zone it's 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 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 your playing field will disappear or something about the  plant growing roots and it's constricted 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 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 key words, some stuff will happen.  For example, if you type down, your movement direction will change and you 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 found out 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 used some graphics we had from an earlier game and basically tried out making some levels  and saw 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 to make our levels, which was good.  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.  We had these simple rules about movement and we ourselves had to find out what we could  do with them, 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 revelations which the player can then discover  for themselves.  We had 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 fancier fonts and at very beautiful  background graphics and music that fits the game and 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 is a phase 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 made it a bit more  visible.  And many people also liked this effect of having simple rules and complicated consequences  of these rules.  Some other people liked how it looked.  And a fun thing that happens in the game is that some people will record themselves while  they are playing the game.  They will stream something on Twitch and record it and put it on 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  in the game itself because you can write text there, basically.  So the person commented on how they were doing while playing this.  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 they had about 2,000 submissions or so.  And these were 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, from  the games I made.  You can check it out here.  Right.  And then I want to give you some tips and tricks I picked up over the years of doing  this which might be helpful if you want to try this for yourself.  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 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 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 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 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 Ludendire 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 Creative Commons  and you have three days to make your game.  And then in the other rule set, the compo rule set, I think this compo 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 a talent.  One thing I recommend for preparation is, for example, to have enough food around.  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 in my mind, right?  Get enough sleep, I would say.  I most often also sleep during the event, but I know people are different and 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 Unreal 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 love2d.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?  They have very nice forums.  And if you look at the bottom right, it says BeWant, however, that the community sometimes  gets too friendly.  So look out for that.  Yeah.  Another engine I started trying out this year is called Pico8.  And this is something some people call a fantasy console.  So it's a piece of software that gives you a very constrained set of things you can work  with.  You have a set of 128 by 128 pixels.  You have 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.  It has a level editor.  It has a built-in code editor also.  So you can actually stay inside of this 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 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 get a bit more pixels, which I personally don't like as much aesthetically.  But you also get a level editor or sound editor built-in.  Okay.  So what about making graphics?  I have sometimes recommended sites like opengameart.org, where you can find pre-made character  graphics and sprite sheets and tiles for making maps and so on.  But personally, I have never used them.  And I have never seen them successfully used.  Because often the idea of your game will be so specific that it's not very helpful to  have a pre-made graphic or try to find a very specific thing 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 fast to create a 16 by 16 image, for example.  And a software I recommend of doing that is called Asproid.  I sometimes do pixel art workshops.  And one of them was recorded, actually.  So if you're interested in learning about Asproid and about making pixel art, you can  check out this recording.  I will give a URL to these slides 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 in which graphics to make.  And Inkscape is another good open source program for creating vector graphics.  And another idea maybe is if you don't feel comfortable in making very complex graphics  yourself, you can keep the visual style of your game very minimalist and abstract.  Like constrain yourself to a foreground and a background color, work with simple shapes,  for example.  That's something I've seen working very well in the past.  So to the topic of sound effects, the first thing to say is definitely add 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 sound effects to your actions,  it gets so much more fluid and more juicy and 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 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 also.  And if you don't want to do that, there are some resources like the FreeSound 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 side to download the sound effects, which is kind of annoying,  but for me it's worth it.  And then there is a software called SFXR, which is basically a sound effect synthesizer.  This is kind of a hack.  This was created specifically for Ludum Dare, because I said in this very constrained rule  set, you need to create the sound effects on that weekend.  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 get some sound effects that sounds like an explosion or like  a coin pickup 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 pickup 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, incompetec.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 dropdown and then select 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 a 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 discouraging for people if they have a  very, very, very, yeah, an idea that doesn't sound realistic and other people say, ah,  we cannot do that.  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.  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 more about that point and maybe see if you find a second or a third  idea which you really like and then you can look at these ideas a bit more distantly and  see which one of these you like.  Because yeah, the core mechanic of the game has to be fun.  That's, for me, one of the most important things.  Yeah, a word 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 10  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 at all, right?  Because the game needs to explain this.  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 you text feedbacks,  for example, over a mail.  You can see their emotions and all of their reactions and their confusions.  And yeah, that'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 Ludum Derry 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 there.  And then other people can vote on these themes and a multi-stage process at the end.  Only one theme will be remaining.  The next global game gem is coming up next year in the end of January.  And at that point, you can look at this map again and 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.  If you are kind of impatient and don't wait as long, you can also look at this site called  IndieGameGams.com.  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 at the game  and look at this calendar and pick something you would enjoy.  There is also another site called itch.io, which is like a hosting service for independent  video games.  And they also sometimes organize their own events, their own game gems.  And they have a similar calendar on their site.  This is only the first third of that calendar because there are so many that didn't fit  on the screen.  I once saw a game gem on there called BitGem, 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 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 keys, which was kind of  your playing field, and the screen would give you feedback if you fell down or something.  Then last year I found another site which I really enjoyed, another game gem, which is  called the one hour game gem.  So this takes place each Saturday and goes for exactly one hour starting at 20 UTC and  then they announce a theme.  And you can try to make a game in one hour if you want.  The way 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 gem  which takes place when shifting the clocks back from daily savings time in autumn.  So it goes from 2 AM to 2 AM and people have made games in that time period.  So if you want, you cannot 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.  Welcome and thanks a lot.
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Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining me this morning 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 Lenri. 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 hot-con 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 genuinely interested in making video games yourself? That's a lot of hands, and that's also in that hero 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. 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 a game. 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 threefold. 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 give you a little bit of a peek behind the scenes of one of them 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 hackathon 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 that 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 office 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 in the end they put the results on a website and put some documentation on, and this format was really, really successful. One of the participants in this indie Game Jam was Jonathan Blow, which you might know from games like Braid or The Witness, for example, which he made later. So many people really liked that format, so only one month later in April 2002, another person put up a website called ludumdare.com, which was another Game Jam, and in this case 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 Game Jam has about 2,000 to 3,000 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 ludumdare, and while it's certainly a very daring thing to participate in the Game Jam, this is Latin, and then it means to give a game, basically, or more idiomatically to play a trick on someone. And I really, really like the atmosphere of this ludumdare 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 Game Jam. I think I found it two or three years ago, and I liked it so much that I since then participated 10 times in a row by now. It happens two or three times a year. So I said you're given a theme for this Game Jam. Here's a list of all the ludumdare themes so far, and many of them put some creative restrictions on your game design. For example, one of the themes was 10 seconds, one of them was an entire game on one screen. And in that case, you have to 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. The ludumdare is considered to be the second largest game in the 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 driven by non-profit charity, and in this case, it's a distributed Game Jam, so you have all over the world several sites where you can go to participate and to meet other game creators. So in the first global Game Jam, they had 1,600 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 a list of the global 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 fit that. Or the year after that, the sound of a 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 is the Toad Jam, which happens in Toronto, each spring. And GitHub sponsors a Game Jam called 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 a Game Jam organized by a popular YouTube channel called Game Maker's 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, less focused on a polished game, so it's less about the graphics and the audio, but it's about really clever game mechanics. Sometimes these games get developed further after a Game Jam, so there are some popular commercial games which you might have heard of, which started as Game Jam games. For example, Baba is You was an entry to the Nordic Game Jam two years ago to the theme of Not There. Or Mini Metro, for example, was a Ludum Dare 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 Game Jam entry. Okay, so let me show you some games I made and tell the story of one of them. The first entry I made was like a solo entry. It was a theme of shapeshift. And it had this little story where a fairy would give you the ability to shapeshift. But what the fairy didn't tell you, that you shapeshifted into the closest object to you. So congratulations, you are a floor lamp now. And the game is then about 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 mouse hole to eat all the cheese on the ground. So it's a game of want. Fast reactions and a bit of strategic planning. Together with the friend I made, 20,000 pixels into the sea, which is a sailing simulator, basically. This was really interesting for us to learn about how sailboats work and how to put your sail in the correct direction to go against the wind, for example, how you do that. And we were stumped for about an hour or so trying to find out how a boat actually turns or that works, which forces unwolfed until we realized that you have rudders, which 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 das das für ein? So this was das das für ein Ruhm. And it's a puzzle game, basically, where you are given a amount of furniture and you are supposed to put it on a floor plan so that you satisfy some conditions. For example, you cannot block the door and you cannot put shelves in front of windows so you don't block the light. We made some interesting levels around that, I think. There was a racing game called a bloody small world, which takes place in the human blood stream 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 made 10 little letters, which is a very abstract minimalist game about finding out the shape of letters 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. That's also fun. You 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 actually jump over the text to get to places and then you can decide which direction you want to go. You had a very talented artist who do these nice backgrounds. In artisan 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 Piggy's, which is all about looing evil banker piggies into traps by putting coins somewhere and they will eat it and grow. And the game I want to talk to you more about is called Right to Space. We made this last year for Ludendara and basically the process, how it all starts is with a theme announcement, right? So Ludendara 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 miss it. And in this case, the theme was running out of space. The announcement happens at zero UTC, so on this time zone it's 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 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 your playing field will disappear or something about the plant growing roots and it's constricted 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 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 key words, some stuff will happen. For example, if you type down, your movement direction will change and you 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 found out 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 used some graphics we had from an earlier game and basically tried out making some levels and saw 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 to make our levels, which was good. 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. We had these simple rules about movement and we ourselves had to find out what we could do with them, 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 revelations which the player can then discover for themselves. We had 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 fancier fonts and at very beautiful background graphics and music that fits the game and 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 is a phase 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 made it a bit more visible. And many people also liked this effect of having simple rules and complicated consequences of these rules. Some other people liked how it looked. And a fun thing that happens in the game is that some people will record themselves while they are playing the game. They will stream something on Twitch and record it and put it on 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 in the game itself because you can write text there, basically. So the person commented on how they were doing while playing this. 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 they had about 2,000 submissions or so. And these were 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, from the games I made. You can check it out here. Right. And then I want to give you some tips and tricks I picked up over the years of doing this which might be helpful if you want to try this for yourself. 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 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 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 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 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 Ludendire 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 Creative Commons and you have three days to make your game. And then in the other rule set, the compo rule set, I think this compo 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 a talent. One thing I recommend for preparation is, for example, to have enough food around. 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 in my mind, right? Get enough sleep, I would say. I most often also sleep during the event, but I know people are different and 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 Unreal 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 love2d.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? They have very nice forums. And if you look at the bottom right, it says BeWant, however, that the community sometimes gets too friendly. So look out for that. Yeah. Another engine I started trying out this year is called Pico8. And this is something some people call a fantasy console. So it's a piece of software that gives you a very constrained set of things you can work with. You have a set of 128 by 128 pixels. You have 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. It has a level editor. It has a built-in code editor also. So you can actually stay inside of this 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 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 get a bit more pixels, which I personally don't like as much aesthetically. But you also get a level editor or sound editor built-in. Okay. So what about making graphics? I have sometimes recommended sites like opengameart.org, where you can find pre-made character graphics and sprite sheets and tiles for making maps and so on. But personally, I have never used them. And I have never seen them successfully used. Because often the idea of your game will be so specific that it's not very helpful to have a pre-made graphic or try to find a very specific thing 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 fast to create a 16 by 16 image, for example. And a software I recommend of doing that is called Asproid. I sometimes do pixel art workshops. And one of them was recorded, actually. So if you're interested in learning about Asproid and about making pixel art, you can check out this recording. I will give a URL to these slides 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 in which graphics to make. And Inkscape is another good open source program for creating vector graphics. And another idea maybe is if you don't feel comfortable in making very complex graphics yourself, you can keep the visual style of your game very minimalist and abstract. Like constrain yourself to a foreground and a background color, work with simple shapes, for example. That's something I've seen working very well in the past. So to the topic of sound effects, the first thing to say is definitely add 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 sound effects to your actions, it gets so much more fluid and more juicy and 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 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 also. And if you don't want to do that, there are some resources like the FreeSound 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 side to download the sound effects, which is kind of annoying, but for me it's worth it. And then there is a software called SFXR, which is basically a sound effect synthesizer. This is kind of a hack. This was created specifically for Ludum Dare, because I said in this very constrained rule set, you need to create the sound effects on that weekend. 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 get some sound effects that sounds like an explosion or like a coin pickup 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 pickup 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, incompetec.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 dropdown and then select 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 a 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 discouraging for people if they have a very, very, very, yeah, an idea that doesn't sound realistic and other people say, ah, we cannot do that. 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. 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 more about that point and maybe see if you find a second or a third idea which you really like and then you can look at these ideas a bit more distantly and see which one of these you like. Because yeah, the core mechanic of the game has to be fun. That's, for me, one of the most important things. Yeah, a word 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 10 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 at all, right? Because the game needs to explain this. 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 you text feedbacks, for example, over a mail. You can see their emotions and all of their reactions and their confusions. And yeah, that'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 Ludum Derry 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 there. And then other people can vote on these themes and a multi-stage process at the end. Only one theme will be remaining. The next global game gem is coming up next year in the end of January. And at that point, you can look at this map again and 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. If you are kind of impatient and don't wait as long, you can also look at this site called IndieGameGams.com. 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 at the game and look at this calendar and pick something you would enjoy. There is also another site called itch.io, which is like a hosting service for independent video games. And they also sometimes organize their own events, their own game gems. And they have a similar calendar on their site. This is only the first third of that calendar because there are so many that didn't fit on the screen. I once saw a game gem on there called BitGem, 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 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 keys, which was kind of your playing field, and the screen would give you feedback if you fell down or something. Then last year I found another site which I really enjoyed, another game gem, which is called the one hour game gem. So this takes place each Saturday and goes for exactly one hour starting at 20 UTC and then they announce a theme. And you can try to make a game in one hour if you want. The way 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 gem which takes place when shifting the clocks back from daily savings time in autumn. So it goes from 2 AM to 2 AM and people have made games in that time period. So if you want, you cannot 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. Welcome and thanks a lot.
share some of that excitement with all of you. do is making very, very tiny video games. I also which are left. So this talk is for those of you, frustrating, and then I would have half a game. awesome opportunity to actually like force where they come from. I want to showcase some of to empower all of you to actually participate you're given a theme, and then alone or in a team, you make a video game around that theme, their own games around that. And in the end they anywhere basically. And yeah, the very first Ludum Dare Game Jam was really small. They had think I found it two or three years ago, and I liked it so much that I since then participated 10 times in a row by now. It happens two or three all into your luggage, which might have been fun. could just use them to make our levels, which was to figure out how it works. This person, for give you some tips and tricks I picked up over you want to try this for yourself. First of all, interdisciplinary teams also. I've been very team is a very good experience for me. And yeah, it also always puts me in this flow-like state of participating. I quickly want to go over the rule Creative Commons and you have three days to make built-in. Okay. So what about making graphics? I myself, actually. So I would walk around my on these themes and a multi-stage process at the I would encourage you to. That's all I got for