One month ago, I participated in my first ever game jam, the Sogeti Green x Game Jam. To commemorate it, I decided to create a blog post detailing how everything went and state my personal experience. It has been a while since my last blog and I thought that this event should be interesting enough.
For a better reading experience, this post is going to be divided into 3 different sections. Where each section is going to focus on a certain time frame of the event. The approach is very similar to what I used in my last post. I will say this just in case, but this blog post is over 9400 words long. If you have been reading my other blog posts. This translates to a length 2.5 times longer than my previous longest post. Which surprisingly matches with the blog post that I gave the link to a few sentences ago. If you prefer instead a metric that is comparable and usable in the real word. 9400 words represents a 10% of the size of the average novel word count. Pretty long blog post is not it? Will you read it from beginning to end? I wonder about that.
Before starting with the post itself. I want to make clear that all the screenshots and contents of the following post have been taken and redacted after the event has finished. As I did not thought at all about making a blog post during the event itself. It would have been nice to have screenshots with some participants but that unfortunately is not the case. Nonetheless, the images with people on them, if there are any in the blog post, are not actually mine. Before anybody else asks, I did get the proper permission from the organization to be able to post screenshots. Now that everything is out of the way, let’s start already with the blog entry.
Prologue
You might be wondering why I have included a section which is not strictly related to the Sogeti Green x Game Jam. That is really a good question. The answer may be a little bit unexpected but I think it brings context and awareness to the whole topic. I love to always fill out all possible details for those that care. As I do not like to create any ambiguity or inconsistency even if they are not particularly interesting. Also, I really believe that an experience is not complete if you skip part of the journey.
At the beginning of 2022 as lots of people do. I wrote myself my new year’s resolutions or tasks that oneself must complete before the year ends. In my case, I had a list with 7 entries where one of them was to participate in at least 2 game jams. Moving on to May, and I still had not participated in any yet. I was not worried at all then since I had lots of free time. Plus meanwhile, I was working on some projects and learning new stuff. I was not wasting any time.
However, on Tuesday May 10th, when I logged in to do my weekly LinkedIn check-up. I saw that I had a pending network invitation from a person called Amandine Jennifer Durand. This individual was the one that let me know about the game jam. I was reclutant at first so I did not answer her message until next week. As I wanted to deeply think about whether to join the game jam or not and how it would effect my schedule and projects. In the end, I decided that I would join it because…
The first time that I visited the Sogeti Green x Game Jam website, something caught my attention. I found it very weird to already have the topic of the game jam revealed so early. Probably there were some good intentions behind the choice. But I personally believe that it was instead an horrible idea which could have had disastrous consequences. Normally, I would expect such critical information to be revealed during the opening ceremony. Not one month before the event actually starts.
Some team could have easily cheated and started developing their game way before all the other participants. Obtaining along the way an enormous unfair advantage over everybody else. I do not think this was the case after watching each game submission on the last day. But the possibility of cheating was still real.
On Tuesday 17th of May I answered Amandine back. I told her that I had the intention to join but I had many doubts about the event. Which depending on her answer it would make my participation impossible so I inquired her about those. One of my greatest doubts was that if we could participate individually as I had nobody to participate with.
Amandine responded to all my doubts and worries the next day. Although, I did not login to LinkedIn until next week. Any participant could enter the competition individually or with a team up to 6 members. However, people with no teams would not be able to actually participate in the event by themselves. They would need to find or create a team to work with other people.
Fortunately, there was going to be a matching session an hour before the event started for those without team. So far, all my roadblocks to join the game jam had been successfully removed but now there was the unknown possibility that I could not find a team member even with the help of those matching sessions. I still decided to give it a try as I had nothing to lose.
3 weeks away from the start of the Sogeti Green x Game Jam and I had not registered yet. Why is that? Because my request from work for a day off on Friday 15th of June still had not been accepted. That was the same day that the game jam started and just to be sure I did not want to join it if I had no guarantee that I could not join it from the very beginning. The logic and intention makes sense but this turned out to be a minor mistake for my part. I could had rather asked Amandine beforehand for the event schedule to check if this was necessary. Spoilers, it was not.
On Monday 30th of May, my day off request was accepted and my path to the event was clean. There was nothing that could stop me. I am not exactly sure as I do not have any email evidence nor I can remember. But I am quite sure that I did not register to the game jam until the week after I got my day off approval.
I did not mention it so far, but I have to say that the game jam website was very beautiful and elegant with a simple design just as I like. As the website will surely change in the future, here there is a page screenshot that I took myself. There is also an available archive.org online capture from that time.
The registration process was very straightforward and fast. It asked what it should ask and nothing out of the ordinary. My biggest concern about it that I realized when writting this blog post, is regarding the XP level. What was the whole point of it? I have no idea.
One of the steps of the registration procedure asked if you are a developer or a designer. That makes complete sense as it helps a lot in order to be able to form cohesive teams. We could argue whether roles such as animator, artist, musician… are missing but that is not the point. Apart from your expected role within a team. Another of the questions of the form was how much experience you had in game development. Maybe this had an effect somewhere or it simply was some information that the organization wanted to know. But unless I am wrong, this did not look like it.
On the last week before the event started, the Sogeti Green x Game Jam’s schedule was finally released. This is when I realized that I asked for one day off at work for nothing. Since on Fridays, I worked only from 08:00 to 15:00. However, I was going to take advantage of that and not waste it by making some preparations for the event which are going to be explained on the next section. This concludes all the journey that led to me participating in the event. By itself, this could already have been a post.
During the Sogeti Green x Game Jam
Day 1 (2022/06/10)
As I mentioned before, the Sogeti Green x Game Jam started late in the afternoon. The first day was overall just the open ceremony and partnerships speeches. However, in my case, this day was the most important for me. I did not have a team and within the given 45 minutes I would need to find one. Otherwise, I could not participate in the event.
Since I was on vacation that day. The first thing that I did was to sleep most of the morning. This helped a lot as I am usually really tired by the start of the weekend. That is mainly due to the intensity of my schedule. Working 8 hours as a programmer, practicing 1 hour of Japanese and an extra 3-4 hours of programming or learning to advance projects at home every day. It slowly pays its toll to the body and mind. Specifically, the mind. The fact that I only sleep 6 hours per day probably does contribute to that. My goal was to be at peak performance for the event and I can say that I achieved it.
During the afternoon, I had a few hours before the game jam started. I used that time to start making preparations ahead and make sure that everything was working as expected. For example, I installed the latest LTS (Long Term Support) Unity version available at the time, Unity 2021.3.4f1, with some common modules. The Unity version that I was using previously was still from 2020. It would probably not have made a difference for a 2 day video game project but installing newer updated versions every now and then always improves things.
After that I focused on other meaningful tasks such as, learning about version control in Unity. Back in 2020, the official version control software in Unity was Unity Collaborate. I even wrote a blog post on how to configure and share projects between individuals. Keep in mind that the tutorial is out of date but there is a warning at the beginning of the post anyways. Back then, I also knew that Unity Collaborate would be terminated soon in the future. The difference was that there was not a date yet for that or I was unaware of it. Now, this is no longer the case. Plastic SCM has replaced Unity Collaborate. So I had to do some research about that software to learn how to set up projects with it.
The lists of tasks that I performed within that free time frame goes on but I will stop here. They are not really that interesting plus they do not contribute much to the topic. The only remaining task worth mentioning is that I joined the event’s Discord server and presented myself to everyone. Though I did not mention that I was teamless at that moment. Maybe I should have said it and I would have got a teammate before the game jam began. However, it is really pointless to wonder about this. To begin with, the best approach would have been to actually join the Discord server weeks ago and try to find a team by then.
Let’s finally move on to 18:00, when the Sogeti Green x Game Jam truly begins. I checked the schedule and I realized something that I had not until now. Wait… where the hell is the auditorium? I was already lost. Thankfully, a few hours before the event started, all participants received a Google Meet invitation so I joined it. There, the organizers explained that this call was to let people know that in order to reach the auditorium, you had to go to WorkAdventure. So I did exactly that.
You can think of WorkAdventure as a social hub where you socialize with others and also work together. The first similar example that came to my mind was Habbo Hotel but it lacks the work part. This is only so that you can get the general picture. For those interested, just search by yourself what WorkAdventure truly is. To be honest, it was by far the most entertaining part of the event. Even more than the whole creation of the game to submit. The first time you enter WorkAdventure, you will have to create your avatar or Woka, the official term. Spent some time customizing my character and proceeded to spawn in the world map.
I have to congratulate the Sogeti Green x Game Jam for their amazing work in creating an exciting and interesting lobby map. The whole lobby map was a representation of the Earth with some secrets and hidden easter eggs placed around it. All players would always spawn at Greenland so there was a constant flux of players joining in.
I ran around the map and I discovered that there are three building which you can enter to. The building in the USA, the building in India, and the building in Europe. Those were the respective building each participant needed to stay in depending on their region. So in my case, I had to go to the Europe building since I was participating from Spain. Makes sense and it helps in organizing everything.
Here there is an image which covers about an 80% of the world map. You should be able to easily locate the different buildings that I was talking about. This image was sent in the email that all participants received on the first day of the game jam. As a small notice, this map image seems to be from probably an older version of it. I noticed that because there were no animals at all in the map but there were also no map arrows. For example, you should be able to see a small fraction of the Greenland whale but you cannot. Just compare the following image with the one from above.
Once inside the European bulding, I tried searching for the auditorium. I have to shamelessly admit that it took me more time than I would have liked. The buildings inside are quite big so it took its time. I even left the building during the process to search around the map because I was not able to find the auditorium at first. Moreover, I went to take a quick look inside the USA and India building as maybe the auditorium was only accessible through one of the buildings. For those curious, all the buildings had the same exact structure and layout. The only difference that I spotted was that each entrance had a matching colour with their roof in the world map.
In the end, I found the auditorium which was located at the furthest part of the building. Not sure how much time it took me to actually find it but I was definetely late. The opening ceremony was ongoing and it did not look like that it recently started. There was nothing special about the act. The organizers thanked us for participating in the Sogeti Green x Game Jam, explained the rules, schedules… and other stuff which we can skip. The only important part to remember was that all meetings would be held in the auditorium, unless otherwise specified.
After the ceremony ended, I returned to the European building and it was now time for my critical and decisive moment. To join a team or instead find someone without a team and form one together with them. My goal, if possible, was to create a team of 2 members because the more people that you have to manage the worse it usually gets. Even more if we consider that I was dealing with complete strangers.
Fortunately, each regional building had prepared an open room where supposedly, participants should be able to easily find teammates. Let me tell you that was absolutely not the case. I waited several minutes in that room but nobody came at all. Probably, most of the Europe branch participants entered the game jam with a team. Cannot blame them as this is the most reasonable approach if you want to win the event. Maybe it would have been nice if the rooms to search for teammates had been a shared instance like the auditorium. I had no way to know if this situation was also happening in both the Indian and American building.
It was still early to call quits but the situation looked grim for me. Since I was not doing any progress at all through WorkAdventure, I decided to try in Discord instead. The Discord channel of the Sogeti Green x Game Jam had a specific channel for this. So I went there wrote a message explaining my situation and I waited. Posting a message in Discord had its avantages as everybody from the server would be able to see it. Also using this method, organizers would know about my intentions and they could help me find a team, if needed. There was not much activity on the channel but there was some, which was a good sign. This meant that there was some people searching also for teammates. My chances to find a team slightly increased.
Not too long after I posted my Discord message, someone by the name of Lily replied to my comment. They were too trying to create a team to participate in the event. We talked a bit in the public chat along the other people with the same goal as ours. But we decided to move on to a private conversation. It would be more efficient and this way we could have a call for better communication. The name of Lily should have probably given away the fact that I was about to speak to a girl. However, I was really not expecting it plus usually, names in a social media platform should be taken lightly. As nothing is ever as it seems.
Lily and I had a pretty long conversation. She explained to me that she had an idea for a game and she was trying to find someone to recreate it. She proceeded to explain the idea and I stopped her whenever I had some doubts or something was not completely clear. Basically, her goal was to create a 2D clicker game where you had an unhabitated plot of land. The player should try and make it habitable by placing different flora and fauna. In order to do that, the player would win nature points as currency whenever they clicked the game screen. Then, those nature points could be reedeemed in the shop for different animals and plants. The name of the game would be Rewildly which perfecly fit the topic of the game.
I agreed in recreating her idea since it looked doable within the given period of 2 days. Lily would be working as the team’s game designer and spokeswoman meanwhile I would be the team’s programmer and organizer. Lily could as well implement some features in the game as I asked her if she knew how to code. With the remaining time of the hour that we had, we went and officially registered our team. The process was as easy as filling out a row of an Excel file with the name of the team, the WorkAdventure room number which we work from and a list with all the team members. We decided to name our team Rewildly, just like, our game idea and chose room number 58 for our headquarters.
Soon after that, me and Lily went to have lunch by separate. We agreed to meet later again in WorkAdventure once we finished eating. I did not mention it yet, but Lily was from the United Kingdom. United Kingdom’s schedule and lifestyle is very different in comparison to the Spanish one so there were some small time inconviences. Nonetheless, I believed that we would become a great team together. I had no complaints with my partner and I was happy that I could participate in my first game jam. The only remaining step was to develop, finish and present our game.
I was the first to return from dinner. As there was not much that I could do by myself at this point in time. I decided to start preparing the Unity project and set up all the process to make it shareable with other members with Plastic SCM. Thanks to the tutorials that I had watched in the morning, I finished that quite fast. This was the first of many breaks and I was really excited to continue developing our game for the Sogeti Green x Game Jam.
The next task that I focused on as the team’s organizer meanwhile Lily was away, was the project’s workflow. I had already made some research about this topic in the morning and I discovered that for game jams there exists a very useful and popular task priorization system called MoSCoW. MoSCoW is an acronym which uses the first letter of each of its 4 prioritization categories. The interstitial Os are added to make the word pronounceable. While the Os are usually in lower-case to indicate that they do not stand for anything. You will probably get the idea behind how the MoSCoW priorization technique works once you discover its categories and meanings. So I will not dwelve more into it other than this. Overall, it is a very simple and fast workflow to deploy. That is why it is very popular within game jams, I suppose.
Around 2 hours later, both me and Lily were back in WorkAdventure in our team room. Each team room had a very useful feature were a Jitsi would automatically be created and all the persons within the room would join it. There was no need for us to have more private Discord calls. Instead, we would only use Discord chat to send links or attachments since that was not possible in WorkAdventure.
I told her after greeting her what I had been doing during the time she was away. Now before anything else, the top priority was to make sure that the Unity project was working as expected. By working as expected, I mean that either Lily and I could make changes to the projects and the other individual would be able to download them. In other words, to check and make sure that the version control system was working. Once that was finally ready, we could focus completely on developing the game.
Unfortunately, Lily was not able to clone and download the project. Plastic SCM, Unity’s version control system, was throwing weird errors and did not let her. Cannot blame her as Plastic SCM was an annoyance during the whole project. If a user has problems doing the most basic feature of your product, there is a major problem. My first experience with Plastic SCM was also terrible. Not sure if this was partially due to the pressure created by the event time limit but it was awful and overly complicated to use. Unity Collaborate, the previous Unity’s version control software, was way better, stable and user-friendly.
Anyways, we spent a good amount of time and we were not able to solve the issue, me included. Since it was starting to get late into the night, I told Lily that she should try to fix the issue by herself by tomorrow. If she was unsuccessful by then, we would try changing the version control system to another software like GitHub. After this last word exchange, Lily disconnected from WorkAdventure and I started working in the game. I had a few spare hours as I usually only sleep 6 hours a day so I made considerable progress in the project. I created the project folder structure and put together the layout for the shop mode. It was about 04:30 when I went to sleep and in a few hours, 09:00 to be precise. The second day of the Sogeti Green x Game Jam would start.
Day 2 (2022/06/11)
I woke up at 09:00 and directly logged in to WorkAdventure and headed to the auditorium without eating breakfast. To my surprise, the auditorium was almost empty and I really mean it. Sure it makes sense that in the opening ceremony almost everybody was present but I still got surprised. Maybe it was due to the time zones but it does not really matter.
The announcement was simply a reminder of the day’s schedule while proving some extra information about the important hours. The first key point of the day would be the crash test which would take place at 10:30. From 10:30 to 12:00 someone would be visiting each group to know what type of game everyone was creating. The other key point was a deadline at 17:00 where we had to publish our game and record 3 minutes of gameplay. Each team could choose whatever platform to share their game as long as it was accessible by the organizers. Then finally, at 19:50, the top 15 teams would be announced. Those selected would be able to continue developing their game and would have a chance to win an event prize.
After the short meeting ended, I returned to the European building and went to our team room. I opened up the project and I kept working on what I was doing yesterday until Lily logged in. After Lily logged in, I greeted her and I showed all the work that I had done so far. She provided some feedback and she told me that she was able to fix the issue with Plastic SCM. This meant that our project set up was completed and we could focus on the game and the incoming deadlines. We kept working on the project till it was our time for the crash test.
I mentioned before that the WorkAdventure Sogeti Green x Game Jam team’s rooms had a very useful feature where a Jitsi call was created for each room. Anyone that entered the room would automatically join the call so you can imagine what happened. We were developing our game when out of the sudden we heard a random man’s voice greeting us. That caught us completely out of guard, specially me. The voice in question was from the person that was going to guide us through the crash test. I cannot recall his name but he seemed to be a very friendly and enthusiastic fellow which made everything easier. I even tried browsing through the list of mentors and checking their LinkedIn profiles but I had no success. There is a feeling that our mentor’s name began with C but it neither was Claude Chauver nor Chip Purcell.
The crash test sounds scary but it really was not. It was just explaining to that person what our game was about and answer any of his questions. Overall, the procedure took around 15 minutes. Our mentor seemed very happy with our game idea and provided us with some feedback and suggestions. Unfortunately, we did not have much progress done at the moment that we could show him. We had a very primitive non-functional land and a barely functionable shop. There was lots of work to be completed and we had to share our first game version today at 17:00. However, I guess that he was able to imagine the whole game as it did not have much depth after all. He also mentioned us that he was thrilled in seeing the final product. His words, at least for me, improved my motivation for the rest of the day.
Once the crash test ended, it was break time, according to the Sogeti Green x Game Jam’s schedule. Lily went to have lunch which makes sense if we take into consideration the British meal schedule. We said goodbye and agreed on meeting again in our WorkAdventure team room whenever we were finished. Since it was too early for me to have lunch, I spent my time reasearching ways to share our game. Obviously, I already knew how to create playable game builds and exports game in Unity. I was rather looking for options on how to do it online. With that approach, we would only need to send a link to the game demo to the organizers.
I learnt several ways to achieve what I wanted but only one caught my attention, the Unity official method. Apart from being an official solution it was also very fast to deploy which was ideal for us. The method that I am talking about uses Unity Play. Unity Play is a Unity website whose goal is to become the place for aspiring game creators to share their latest WebGL creation. This perfectly matched with our needs to fulfill one of the requirements for today’s deadline.
In order to use Unity Play, you only need to open your Unity project and switch to the WebGL platform. Configure your WebGL build settings and install the package WebL Publisher through the Unity Packet Manager. Finally, press the new option that has been included in the top menu navigation, Publish > WebGL Project and wait. Once the progress finishes, a new browser window with your game uploaded at Unity Play will appear. The last step remaining is filling the required information to make your project public and that is it. It is as easy as that and probably building the game will take longer than all the other steps combined. The only downside that I found with this approach is that Unity Play will not respect your game resolution. This is a big limitation and there is no way to avoid it.
We are now at 14:00 and it was time for HR (Human Resources) networking. You can call me delusional but I originally thought that these HR sessions were to help us find a job within the video game industry. That was not the case and it was just an interview to maybe get hired at Sogeti. I had high expectations for them but in a matter of seconds I lost all interest. When I learned their real purpose, I removed mine from the schedule. There was no point nor incentive for me, as I was happy with my job. Also, at that time I was the lead developer of a project for a very important company. That company was in the top 200 of Forbes Global 2000, an annual ranking of the top 2000 public companies in the world. For comparison, Capgemini / Sogeti was placed at #523.
Since I was not going to participate in the HR networking sessions, I had a free hour to continue working. At some point in time Lily came back. I actually never asked her if she went to any of those HR interviews, not that it matters. The first deadline of the Sogeti Green x Game Jam was a few hours away. As a reminder, we had to share our game with the organizers and record a 3 minute video of the game. A pretty normal deadline which helps tracking better the status of each team. However, this deadline was actually deadly because the judges would cut by half the number of teams depending on what we sent them. We would go from 30 teams to 15. If you were not between the chosen teams, you were out of the competition with no possible comeback.
So as you can imagine, pressure was starting to build up. Lily and me talked about how to manage the incoming deadline. As the team’s organizer I decided to split the work in two. I would be in charge of uploading the WebGL project at Unity Play as I already knew what to do. Meanwhile, Lily as the spokeswoman of the team, would be in charge of recording the 3 minute video. The plan was that one hour before the deadline, we would stop whatever we were doing and upload our latest changes to the project without breaking it. Dedicate a few minutes to make sure that the game was working as expected and have it as demo ready as possible. Then, for the remaining of the hour, which would probably be around 45 to 50 minutes. We would each do the task that I assigned.
Fortunately, there were no major problems during this critical hour and we completed the deadline in half an hour. For my part, I found some small issues with Unity Play even after researching the topic. The main problem that I had, which I already mentioned in the Unity Play explanation itself, was the game resolution. The below image is more or less a recreation of the resolution problem that I mentioned. This is by the way, not an image of the project’s status back then. The game had a vertical resolution of 360 x 640 pixels which ended right where the plot of land ends. The shovel and world icon should be located within the game resolution but they were not. This is due to how Unity UI elements works, which depending on the used anchors, elements automatically reposition themselves to fit all resolutions.
This issue in particular was very frustrating to deal with. As I had never worked with Unity Play, I was not sure if I was doing something wrong or if it was the platform. I spent a good amount of time reviewing everything, making tests and trying different build settings but I was unsuccessful. Until I discovered that this was indeed a Unity Play problem. After clearing up that issue, I went ahead and published the game in Unity Play. In order to not confuse the organizers, I wrote in the project’s description a disclaimer. The disclaimer mentioned about this Unity Play resolution limitation and that the game resolution should match what the 3 minute recording showcases. This was the only issue with Unity Play. Apart from that, the game was perfectly playable.
The second stepping stone for the Sogeti Green x Game Jam was achieved. We were now only missing the last and most important one. Finishing the game by tomorrow in time and present it to the judges. I do not keep anymore the Unity Play project we used for the deadline as I deleted it. But, for those curious on how did the game’s progress look by the time of the deadline. Please take a look at the video that Lily recorded. As a very short summary, by then, we had completed the clicking mechanic that increases nature points. Paint a plot of land with different layers using tile maps which was not interactive yet. Created a shop layout with all the different flora that could be planted. Originally, we wanted to have fauna (animals) in the game but I suggested dropping the idea because of time restrictions.
Even after delivering the files required for the deadline we had work to do. The top 15 would not be announced till 20:00. That is 3 whole hours of progress that we could not miss so we started working once again. Before that, Lily and I agreed that we would continue developing the game if our team was not selected. Following the event’s schedule like if we were still participating in it.
Everybody was nervously awaiting for the announcement to reveal the top 15 in the Discord group. The results were slightly delayed and they got released near 20:15. Both me and Lily checked them and we saw that we managed to get into the 15 finalists. This is the list of all the finalists. The team number is actually the team room number where each team stays. In our case, we were team ReWidly with our team room number being 58. I am unsure whether the list’s order mattered but if that was the case, we were in the top 3. I was very excited to continue working in the project and see it until the end.
Lily and I departed ways. She had no intentions to login back to WorkAdventure for the remainder of the day. As for me, there is no way I could let that precious available time go to waste. I went to have dinner and returned to work afterwards. I did not personally keep track of the time but I am quite sure I worked from around 21:00 to 04:30 nonstop. Very similar, if not the same, to what I did on day 1.
The project by the time before I went to sleep advanced a lot. All the features of the game had been implemented except the heaviest and most time consuming one. The whole mechanic to place plants in the land and make it interactive. That was what I would be doing for the entire day 3 of the Sogeti Green x Game Jam.
Day 3 (2022/06/12)
For the last day of the Sogeti Green x Game Jam we had 9 hours to finish and submit our games. Alongside the game submission we would need to also make a presentation of 3 minutes about our game. I logged in to WorkAdventure 15 minutes late so I joined the daily presentation when it was ending. Luckily, you can rewatch the last broadcast emitted so after it ended, I watched it all over again.
Our team’s goal for today could be summarized to the 6 following points. First, implement the missing planting mechanic. Second, playtest the game to make sure it is working. Third, fix any bugs and polish the game. Fourth, add additional mechanics to the game if there is enough time. Fifth, build the game and make it a downloadable file. Sixth and last, create and rehearse for the required game presentation.
I explained all the progress that I did last night to Lily and shared with her the team’s tasks. We were almost done but we still needed a small push to finish everything. We distributed the work and we started working on those objectives. As none of us had to go to any of the scheduled HR networking sessions we had no interruptions until lunchtime. At around 12:30 when it was break time, our first and second objectives had been completed. Cool, 4 more to go.
With only 4 hours remaining, things started to look great. Lily would be focusing on the game presentation meanwhile I would do code related tasks. There were practically no bugs to fix in the game. So that took almost no time at all. As I always tested in depth any new mechanics that I would add into the game. Moreover, before that, we already did a small playtesting section. Most of the feedback that we got from that playtesting part, was about polishing the game.
You can theoretically spent infinite time polishing a game but obviously we did not have that much time available. Instead, we decided what would be the best and fastest to modify in the game. We created a list for that and we divided the work between the two. I cannot share that list since it was probably a verbal agreement. I do not really remember. However, I can list some of the improvements that we had in mind to polish the game. Those were simple tasks that would not take much time to do such as add a cursor and icon to the game. Refund the nature point’s cost of a plant if it was not built it in the end. Paint also the plants’ tiles with a colour depending on the tile’s availability. This last point is probably hard to understand without a picture so here is one.
It was near 16:00 when we finished. Our game submission, Rewildly, for the Sogeti Green x Game Jam was finally completed. We were just missing the game presentation which Lily was working on it but we were done basically. Since we had 2 whole hours that we could take advantage of. I told Lily that I would try in that time frame, to implement a deplanting mode where you can remove placed plants. That way the game would feel even more completed. As the game was right now, it was impossible to remove anything that the player planted on a tile. This feature would give the player absolute freedom to do whatever it wanted with the given land. There was nothing to lose and I went ahead and tried. I kept just in case a copy of the project build for if I could not finish in time.
Thankfully, since I coded the building mode in a very dynamic way. I was able within the 2 hour limit to implement the deplanting mode. Obviously, before creating the new build for the game, I tested in depth that everything was working as expected. We were running short on time but we managed to deliver everything 15 minutes before the deadline.
As a small fun fact, which was just the opposite for me. The exact moment that Lily was doing the upload for the organizers, she suddenly disconnected from WorkAdventure without any prior warning. I was dumbfounded when that happened and a lot of questions started to pour into my mind making me anxious. Has Lily been able to deliver our game? Why has Lily disconnected? Does Lily think that we have finished and we can log off? Has Lily betrayed me? Unfortunate timings sure can be a bad influence and my mind was running wild with lots of different thoughts.
However, as an individual with excellent planning skills and the ability to remain composed even at critical times. This was my time to shine and I started devising immediately my plan to solve this urgent issue. But that did not last long for a good reason. I simply asked the organizers if they received the deliverable from group 58 and they told me that they did. Case closed we are back to normal. Lily probably disconnected because something happened and she was likely to login back in a few minutes, which she did. It turned out that the reason behind her sudden disconnection was due to a power surge.
After everything had been clarified and the situation returned to normal, it was 18:00. It was time to begin the game presentations in the auditorium and check all the games from the 15 finalists. There was the real possibility that we would become one of the winners of the event. The Sogeti Green x Game Jam had 3 different prizes to distribute amongst the teams. From my point of my view, it is very questionable to have an award for best code in a game jam. Usually, coding is rushed due to the strict time limit and the fastest to implement approaches are preferred over than the best ones. This is of course my opinion.
I have no idea if a team could be able to win all prizes or if a team could only win one prize. The later approach sounds more reasonable but there was no information regarding this topic or I could not find it. Anyways, if we assume that the later approach is the correct one, which probably is. Statistically, each team would have a 20% chance to win a prize. That is of course assuming that all teams are on the same skill level and have the same chance to win which obviously it is not the case.
Since I am planning to skip over all game presentations as they are not really that interesting and I cannot cover each game. Here you have the judging criteria that was used when evaluating each submission. It is important that you know it because there is a minor point I will mention later on about this topic. The evaluation was not made public and it was decided solely by the 5 juries. Similar to the code prize, I believe that code quality should not be a judging criteria but whatever. Maybe this is something common in game jams.
I believe that the scores should have been made public at least. That way this would have provided some feedback to the teams and they could have checked what areas they could have improved. Additionally, there would have been a ranking of the finalists instead of 3 winners and the rest of finalists. To make it clear, I have no problems with the winners, they all deserved it. They all made a quality 3D game though they all were a team of 5 members. Congratulations to them. Specially for the first prize winners which created a game far superior to everyone elses.
Remember that 2 paragraphs above I said something about the judging criteria? This is it where I am going to state it. If the submissions scores had been public there would be no need for me to say the following. What UI/UX interface score should be given to a game without UI? The thing is that the first prize winners created a game with no UI and it made complete sense for their game. It fit the thematic they wanted to achieve. But how do you rate this? Do you give them full marks? Or maybe you give them a 0? Do you ignore this judging criteria and make an average with the others? There are so many possibilities to take into account. This is something very ambiguous which I would had liked to know the answer. Anyways, here are the 3 winners of the Sogeti Green x Game Jam.
Before closing down this third and final day of the game jam. I am going to move on to the last part of it, the Giant Quizz. We could argue chronologically whether the Giant Quizz should go before the reveal of the winners but I prefer it this way for several reasons. Moreover, I am quite certain that the jury already had decided the winners before the Giant Quizz started. If each judge had its own judging criteria sheet, they simply had to sum all the points from them. The only work left would be choosing the best project for the €2.5k prize. The extra time requested was probably for the design team to create the graphics to reveal the winners. I am still really skeptical about having as a judge criteria code quality. Plus, how do you exactly rate and judge that against other submissions?
The Giant Quizz was the last event of the Sogeti Green x Game Jam. It took place after the game presentations to cover the time that the juries would need to select the winners. It was a Kahoot with twelve questions. Where each question either was related to Sogeti or Intel. For those that forgot or never realized, Intel was the official partnership of this game jam. So most of the questions nobody knew the answer as they where exclusive to those corporations. You make a guess or try to make a logical deduction. However, in Kahoot you obtain points depending on how fast you answered. At most, you can get 1000 points per answer.
The quizz started and I immediately got the first question wrong. I was like, yep I am not winning this. Second question, got it wrong also. This is when I noticed that all questions were going to be related to Sogeti and Intel. There was a chance that I could win because I was pretty knowledgeable for the Intel branch. From the third question onwards, I started getting each correct answer and I managed to get a streak of 6 correct questions. We were at question 8 out of 12 and I was in second place. In first place since the beginning of the quizz, we had GGsparta. 4 questions were missing and as long as I got all of them and GGsparta missed any of them, I would get first place. I knew this because our score difference was less than one hundred points.
9th question came in and we both got it correct, no changes in the standards. 10th question came in and we both get it wrong. This one if I had taken my time to think about it. I could had made it a 50/50 chance as I knew that two out of the four answers were wrong. Instead I choose an answer which was wrong and then I realized I had fucked up. Since GGsparta got it wrong, the situation was still recoverable. 11th question came in and I did not know the answer. I made a random guess and I was lucky enough and I got it right meanwhile GGsparta got it wrong. My victory was almost secured but it was not yet because our score difference was slightly less than one thousand points.
If GGsparta got the next question right while answering really fast and I got it wrong, I would lose. By a mere couple of points, but I would still lose. So all the stakes were onto this last question. 12th question came in and I had no idea what the answer was. Though, I managed to get it through logical deduction by discarding all wrong options. It took me some time to answer the question and I am quite sure that I was the last player to do so. But even getting one hundred points, would grant me the victory. Taking all the time that I needed to answer the question was the most optimal and viable plan. In the end, it did not matter because GGsparta got it wrong but I had no way to know that. It is always nice having a safety net just in case.
Before closing down this last and final day of the event. I wanted to mention that you can download and play the game that Lily and I ended up developing. You can click here to view Rewildly’s project page. As I usually try to do with all my projects, I am also providing the complete Unity project of the game with its source code. If you are curious about how the game internally works, then you can discover it.
I had my doubts whether this special announcement I should have placed here or at the end of the post. After some thoughts, I decided that placing it on both sides would be the most beneficial. The formal announcement will be here and at the end of the blog post, there is going to be a small reminder about the game.
Aftermath
Not much happened once the Sogeti Green x Game Jam ended. Everybody said their farewells and disconnected from WorkAdventure. That is pretty much it.
Some time later on the same day, the administration contacted all participants via Discord. They informed us that if we were interested. We could register our names in a file to get more feedback back from our submission. There was also present another file where you could input your name to receive in the future a certificate for having participated in the game jam. Obviously, I applied to the two options, as I wanted both.
Actually, I was the one that proposed the idea to get additional feedback for our games. The organization liked it and started making all necessary preparations. The motive behind this was because I yearned for a proper code review of Rewildly. As the one that happened on the second day left me with a very unsatisfactory feeling. My goal was to try and have an actual programmer review carefully our code. So it could point out where we could have improved or take a different approach in the code. This would have been even better if I had had the chance to actually speak face-to-face with that person. Though, that was probably asking too much. You do not get many opportunities in life where you can get feedback from more skilled individuals than you. I just simply did not want to waste such occasion.
In the end, I was not able to achieve my purpose. But I was still excited to hear more about the expected detailed feedback. I am a person which loves self-improvement and whenever I see a chance for that, I try to grasp it. So you cannot really judgme me for that. One week later, on June 20th, the feedback finally arrived. I was both scarred and excited to read it. However, once I saw the email’s content, my disappointment was immesurable and it made me mad, which not often happens.
I debated myself whether or not I should place an image in this blog post to show the feedback received. But I refrained from doing so as there was no point. It was actually better to just forget that topic. I can almost guarantee you without a doubt that that feedback would make anybody angry and make them feel offended. Knowing that it was supposed to be detailed and it took a whole week to be sent. The complete feedback was only 40 words in total, no more and no less. Divided into 3 sentences with informal language, missing punctuaction marks, no cohestion, etc. I could rant more about the feedback or maybe write a blog post but I will leave it here. It is better to forget it as I mentioned a few lines above.
After the whole feedback fiasco. I logged in to LinkedIn and started with my publications mentioning that I participated in the Sogeti Green x Game Jam. Given that I enjoyed working with Lily Bickerstaffe even if was for a short amount. I requested her to become part of my LinkedIn network and she gladly did. To try and expand my LinkedIn network more. I also tried to add new contacts with some of the event organizers and judges but their profiles were private so there was unfortunately no way for me to add them.
Those LinkedIn posts that I made each new week, where my last interactions with the game jam. If we exclude this blog post. We are now almost 3 weeks after the event has ended. On the 30th of June, when I was just a few hours away to make this blog post public. I received an email from the organizers with the attachment of the participation certificate that I applied for on the last day. The certificate it is not something too extravagant but I atually quite like it.
On the other hand, I have not heard anything regarding the Giant Quizz prize that I won. A reminder that this happened after finishing first in the Kahoot! quizz which participants joined in while everybody was waiting for the judges’ verdict. I do not care about the NFT that comes with the prize, but I am excited for the unspecified goodies. Moreover, since the Sogeti Green x Game Jam had as partnership Intel. There is a pretty good chance that I might get merchandise from both Sogeti and Intel. Two birds with one stone if I am lucky.
Maybe since I am getting some goodies and they need to be delivered. The NFT is going to be there as a redeemable code or something like that. Since that it is very likely the case. I might not receive my prize in quite a while. Well, I am not really in a rush, so I can definetely wait. At least I am happy that I won something plus I love Kahoot!. It is always a great feeling to not leave empty handed.
For the next game jam that I decide to participate in. I should keep in mind to try and make as many contacts as possible meanwhile I take event screenshots. Not only for blog posts, but to also create memories and maybe even get a job as a video game programmer.
