How to Build a Winning Game: A Step-by-Step Guide
You are given one day, and a theme: connectivity. How do you and a group of six other students you¡¯ve never worked with before end up leaving your hotel room with not just a complete game, but a winning game? This team of second-year students did just that!
Thanks to a collaboration with the Career Collaborative, the team participated in Wolfjaw Studio¡¯s annual Wolfjam hosted at the University of Albany. There, students went head-to-head against 67 other teams, all with the same goal: to craft a game within 26 hours. Not only did they win¡ªbut they received perfect scores from every judge with their entry, Modulings.
How did they do it? Here¡¯s a step-by-step guide to finding success in your next game jam!
Step 1: Make Your Team
The roots of this winning team began when Ayden Brumley (Producer) found the Wolfjam Event on LinkedIn. However, he knew he couldn¡¯t do it alone. He put together a talented team of fellow students¡ªChristopher Eichert (Game Programmer), Finn Bright (Game Artist), Lucas Merill (Game Designer), and William Skish (Sound Designer).
Their interest led to opportunity. The Career Collaborative received a grant to send two teams of seven students to Wolfjam, covering travel and hotel fees.
¡°I was ecstatic when I found out the Career Collaborative funded the event,¡± Brumley said.
But Skish knew their team wasn¡¯t finished. Seth Riddensdale (Game Programmer) and Zachary Nathanson (Game Designer) joined the squad to complete their seven-person group, composed entirely of second-year students. Now that their dream was a reality, they made their way to Albany, New York with Connor Holtcamp, Career Coach at the Career Collaborative, and Kel Bachus, program director for the Interactive Narrative for Games & Digital Media major,.
Step 2: Brainstorm
Once the team arrived at the event, the theme of the game jam¡ªconnections¡ªwas announced and brainstorming began.
¡°Ayden, our producer, had this really genius idea of putting up this Miro board. We would just come up with verbs, nouns, and different adjectives that we would want for a game based on connections,¡± Riddensdale recalled.
That wasn¡¯t the only brainstorming activity they did. Brumley gave all of his team members paper, and had them fold each page into eight sections. ¡°I learned this in my project management course,¡± Brumley said, ¡°I said ‘Team, you have eight minutes, draw as much as you can in the eight squares.’¡±
As the team went around and shared their ideas, they all fell in love with Nathanson’s drawings of small square spaceship pieces with alien-like creatures inside of them. They all agreed this was the perfect concept for Modulings.
¡°Seth pitched the small game idea of a vertical shooter, where you destroy enemy ships. Then, they have pieces fall off that you could use to attach to your own ship,¡± Nathanson explained. ¡°I really liked Seth’s idea, so I kind of drew out how I thought of it, which was less of a shoot ’em up ship going upwards, and more of these little square modules that your ship was made out of, and then the enemy ships were made out of the same thing.¡±
Step 3: A 26 Hour Workday
The team returned to their hotel room and prepped for their early morning. They had a long day of working ahead of them with a deadline of 11 PM the next day to finish their game.
¡°Most of the team went to bed at 1 AM,¡± Nathanson said. ¡°Seth and I worked until three, which we shouldn’t have done.¡±
All night in their hotel room, Riddensdale and Nathanson continued working on their sections of the game. ¡°I didn’t get much sleep that night because I kept thinking of problems,¡± Riddensdale said.
The next morning, with a goal in mind, the team set off. The programmers all took hold of separate sections of the game. Riddensdale had taken the role of dragging and dropping the modules, Eichert focused on enemy shooting, and Nathanson worked on wave spawning mechanics. Meanwhile, focus was poured into the artwork of the game.
¡°The game had a lot of charm, and that’s because of our amazing artist, Finn Bright. We made these comic panels at the very beginning of the game. I was programming them in,¡± Riddensdale said. ¡°We were a great duo because we knew what we both wanted from the comic strip.¡±
Skish was busy producing the music for the game. Together with Riddensdale, they made the music dynamic with the environment of the game. When players entered ¡°build mode,¡± instruments were subtracted from the score, and returned when they exited.
Brumley focused on documentation. One of his challenges was to create a presentation that tied both the theme of connection and greater world problems to the core values of Modulings.
Brumley described this game in two words: assimilation and utilitarianism. ¡°I thought about how does this game do the greater good for the amount of characters in it, but also what does it say about forced assimilation? You’re taking these characters and you’re dragging them onto your ship. Are you saving them from the virus or are you taking them and forcing them to assimilate to your culture?¡± Brumley reflected. ¡°I think that speaks volumes about a lot of what is going on in the real world.¡±
Brumley also attended various presentations presented by Wolfjaw throughout the event, including networking opportunities where he brought a notebook. When Brumley wasn¡¯t connecting, he was tending to the team. He made business cards for each of his team members so they too could have the opportunity to get their names out.
Time was ticking as the clock got closer to 11 PM. That’s when the team realized their game file was too large to submit. While some team members worked on fixing the file, others helped other teams.
¡°We’re panicking, and Seth and Chris are getting up, and they’re helping the other teams try to get their game to the finish line,¡± Brumley said. ¡°And I’m like, you two are amazing.¡±
Within the last fifteen minutes of the competition, Bright had managed to create three more comic panels to add the finishing touches to the game. With that addition and the file modification, they submitted their game just in time.
Step 4: The Finish Line
The team was finally able to breathe.
¡°After we had finished our game, we huddled around a table and got to play everybody’s games,¡± Riddensdale said.
The team watched as people came through and played their 26-hour creation. ¡°There were these two kids. They were ten years old or younger with their parent, and they just sat there and they played the game for 20 minutes, which was awesome,¡± Nathanson said. ¡°That was my favorite part for sure.¡±
Then, the winner was announced. Modulings had won with perfect scores from all of the judges!
¡°I was kind of shocked, not because I was shocked that our team was so great. I mean, I knew we worked well together, but I was surprised,¡± Brumley said. ¡°I was nervous going into it. I’ve never won anything like that.¡±
Step 5: Connectivity
Modulings was a game about connectivity. Through their experience working together as a team they also found their connections with each other, and with the game production experience.
¡°Champlain prepared us very well for this. None of us had experience in studio yet, none of us had experience working in full production, but I think the students I had with me, my peers, they were just truly amazingly prepared. They knew what they were doing and they brought confidence,¡± Brumley said. ¡°It was kind of like a match made in heaven.¡±
It wasn¡¯t all easy, however. Learning how to work in a team is a steep learning curve. ¡°The difficulties of working with a team are just something that you’re going to have to experience if you’re in the games industry. And so I think that the opportunity of getting your hands dirty as soon as possible is the most important opportunity that you can really take here,¡± Riddensdale said.
Through the thick and thin of the event, the team managed to not only delegate tasks effectively but also navigate a stressful environment.
¡°Our students in particular aren’t afraid of failure,¡± Kel Bachus said. ¡°We’ve taught them that you’re going to get it wrong, and that’s fine. I think inevitably, whether it’s sports or a game jam or whatever it is, it’s an opportunity to find out what you’re made of.¡±
Not only did they take away new skills on teamwork to put in their pocket, but they also took away important networking skills. In all, it is opportunities like Wolfjam that give students the competitive edge to get their foot in the door.
¡°It gets you in. This is the industry we’re working in. This is professional development. You’re not going to a game jam or you’re not going to a networking event to do nothing. You are going to show what you are learning and you’re applying it, and then you’re meeting people who are doing it,¡± Brumley said. ¡°You can find them 10 years from now, and say, ‘Hey, remember when I met you at Wolf Jam?’¡±
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