This past weekend, my friends and I ventured over to Austin to participate in this year’s Global Game Jam 2010. For those who are unfamiliar, Global Game Jam (GGJ)  is a yearly convention, hosted in almost every major city, where strangers travel across the land to congregate and develop games within a 48 hour timespan.

Developers, who are unfamiliar and passionate, band together and combine their prowess in creating a game. There is no fee required to participate. All you need is your laptop and a love for making games. Ah, what a beautiful idea.

Having been surrounded with game developers every single day for about half a year, I have come to realize that they are exactly my type of people. Smart, analytical, weird, zaney, eccentric, genius, technical and passionate are all adjectives that can be used to describe the majority of game developers. You place them all in a room and their brains will sync-up to dump something creative and wonderful onto your computer screen.

I had an absolutely wonderful experience, one that will never fade in memory. However, I was initially hesitant to go. Given that most commercial games nowadays take years to develop, what can a small team of amateurs developers possibly create in 48 hours?

[Play Our GGJ Game]

Here are some things that I have learned from my experience in this year’s Global Game Jam:

Create a Core Gameplay Mechanic
If you analyze any great game, you will notice that if you strip off all the polish of the game,what is left behind is the basic core mechanic that serves as the foundation of the entire game. Given that this year’s theme was deception, we settled on having a stealth mechanic. You had to get from point A to point B by deceiving the enemy. And with simple, well-implemented AI, you can have the player feel the tension of being detected, and that is fun.

Just find one simple core mechanic that is fun and milk it for all it’s worth. There will not be alot of time for polish, so all that is shown to the player will be the bare bones of your game.  Thus, you better make sure that the basic gameplay is strong enough to support itself.

Don’t Overscope, Don’t Be Lame
In such a limited time frame, it is absolutely essential that you do not overscope your feature set. It’s so easy to want to build an epic game, but you forget that you only have less than 0.001% of the number of man-hours required to create a full game.

In terms of choosing an engine to use as the technical foundation of your game, make sure you find one that is flexible and high-level enough to allow you to jump right into coding. Given such a limited time-frame, programmers want to be coding games, not engines, so make sure your engine supports all the basic functionality that allows you to display entities and to have them moving around in the screen. We chose flixel because we believed that it provided all the functionality that our game needed. Some hardcore team went straight up C++/OpenGL from scratch (File->NewProject), and that is silly.

Version Control
Version control software such as SVN is absolutely essential in order to streamline your workflow. This method allows all developers to sync up all their codebase and assets into one hub which can be accessed by your entire team. If you prefer passing a USB around to everyone in your crew every time you want to make a change, well, you’re dumb.

Sound
Having sound brings life to your game. Without sound, games feel flat and it becomes impossible for players to immerse themselves into your game. Make sure to find a song that is interesting/dynamic enough to loop without annoying the player. And if you are looking for a great tool to create sound effects, consider DrPetter’s SFXR.

Conclusion
To do something I love with others who share the same passion has not only made this weekend an awesome weekend, it has made it one of the grooviest weekends ever. So if you have the stamina and the passion for games, I highly recommend that you participate in next year’s Global Game Jam.