Lessons learned: Italian Game Jam

Today I wanna share some things I learned at the Italian Game Jam at the Naples Comicon, where we had two days to design a board game from scratch, starting from the theme “street food” and using assigned board game components.

Me and my friend partecipated and decided to represent the theme by making a game that could be played standing up. We brainstormed a lot and in the end the idea that convinced us more was a social deduction game, where each person is an ingredient and one of them, the chef, has to create a recipe guessing the identity of each player and avoiding an impestor ingredient. Each player, in order, gives a hint on its identity but nobody knows if they are the impostor so they need to be clear enough to help the chef to identify the ingredients while being vague enough to avoid being discovered as the imposter.

We passed the first turn of the selection but in the end we didn’t win. I learned a lot in this experience, so today I will write about some things I learned along the way that might be useful for another jam or in general for any project. 

Don’t fixate on fixing

The most important lesson is a bit counterintuitive: for a jam, it’s important to propose an innovative and crazy idea to show your creativity. In 2 days it’s impossible to make a perfectly working prototype, so you shouldn’t obsess about little problems in the game flow. Time is precious and any moment you lose fixing problems is time you could otherwise spend reinforcing what is original about the game. By playtesting the game we obviously discovered many things that didn’t work as we wanted and I wished we would have focused on what mattered the most instead of trying to solve every little thing we discovered.

Highlight your hook

We liked the idea of creating a “street game” about street food that could be played anywhere, even while standing in line to eat. We considered that our most important point of originality but we made two mistakes. The first one was never playing standing up with the judges. This meant that we weren’t showing our selling point, we were just telling them about it. Of course nobody likes standing up where they could instead be on a chair (so probably this wasn’t the best hook possible), but we should have thought of some way to show it nonetheless. The second mistake was not testing the ground to see if this hook was actually interesting and if it was considered a good representation of the theme. We could have asked around or asked the judges when we had the occasion.

Is it easy to test

When brainstorming ideas about games, although I know that testing is important, I often overlook the practicality, logistics and difficulty of playtests. In general, but especially when you have very little time, it’s important to create a game that is easy to test. We made a game that needed at least 4 players, as it had hidden information and social deduction. This is partially due to the fact that we had to create a party game, but there are party games where you can more easily and faithfully recreate other players' turns. Instead, we had to recruit random people to play every time we made some changes. Even in my last academic project, I noticed the big advantage we had in testing a linear and contained game, that allowed us to iterate more.

Where is the feedback directed

Probably the biggest takeaway of the event was not about game design. It was not my first game jam, so I was used to the stress that comes from working 48 hours straight. What I was not used to was working 2 days while constantly receiving feedback on my game . What is a good trick to avoid suffering while people constantly bash your game? It helps a lot to separate your game from yourself. This is a thing you have done, it’s not you, it’s not necessarily representative of your skills, only of your performance in that moment. Of course receiving feedback is always hard, but remember that it’s an inevitable part of the process and can’t be avoided. For a while, don’t be harsh on yourself, then, after some time passes, you can analyze yourself as a game designer to understand where you can improve (as I’m doing just now). Just remember that it's a delicate thing to do, so it's better to do it with a calm mind.