Allo allo,
I’ve finally had time to get some of my thoughts together about the jam, how it went, what lessons I think I and participants could learn, and what changes I might make for future jams.
First of all, I think especially for a first-time run, things went rather well. It’s a testament to the Newgrounds dev community how chill and supportive folks were to each other throughout the event, and we honestly didn’t have to do much to keep the thing on the rails.
I’ll touch more on the event itself later, but I mostly want to talk about game design, since that’s what’s useful to people. “Hidden” was the theme, and that was expressed in quite a few different ways, but if you go ahead and play all the entries, you might be able to distill some common traits out of the best entries that stayed on-theme.
There’s always a certain level of satisfaction in either successfully hiding or successfully finding what is hidden, and that satisfaction needs to hit a sweet spot where the reward matches the challenge. If it’s too easy to hide or find things, it becomes trivial, and if it’s too obtuse and difficult, the challenge quickly outweighs the reward, and satisfaction suffers.
That means, yes, despite the theme being “Hidden,” it is possible to have things that are too hidden. That was not really the case more often than not, but there were some instances where the devs essentially had to come out after the fact and guide people through getting to their hidden content, because it fell outside of what players should realistically be expected to figure out on their own. This is related to a broader concept of puzzle design: It’s not actually that hard to design puzzles that can technically be solved, but the more complicated or unintuitive the puzzle is, the harder it is to teach your players how to think in a way that makes the solution reachable for them. There’s a chasm between what the designer understands (as the person that already has the answers) and what the player understands (starting from zero), and bridging that gap requires some artistry.
As expected, some devs have a bit of a trollish streak in them, and they'd deliberately keep that gap pretty wide in order to mess with players. I think a sprinkling of that here and there can be entertaining as long as it eventually relents, but I think sometimes it's hard for devs to tell when enough is enough. Don't forget that half of the bait and switch is bait. If you're all switch without offering something desirable enough to withstand the abuse, it gets boring fast.
Others worked in better faith, but they still buried the lead too much. To them, I’d advise that bridging the gap isn’t the same as giving away all the answers; so much of it is teaching your audience how to look, then testing their ability to do so. Don’t be afraid to give people a “freebie” (something like a barely hidden object) here and there if it helps them understand how you hide things.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there seemed to be a misunderstanding of what differentiates hiding something from simply putting things a bit out of the way. I think if some devs were asked to explain why their game incorporates the Hidden theme more than the average platformer with collectibles, they’d have a hard time. Some of these put the cart before the horse, working hard to make a fun mechanic first, and then scrambling to figure out what the hell it has to do with Hidden. This is unfortunately how things go in jams; there’s not a lot of time for experimentation, so people tend to go all-in with their first idea even if that idea drives them further away from the goal of the jam. By the time you find that out, it’s often too late to change course.
There are a lot of ways I could divide the entries, but generally I’ve thought about them as belonging to one of three camps: The first based their core mechanic(s) on the Hidden theme, the second incorporated hiding or hidden elements as a vestigial and not-totally-necessary mechanic, and the third were only related to the theme in name or in some unsubstantial or superficial way. You’d think that the quality of these games would get worse as they got farther from the mark, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. There were a few that were quite good, but maybe it was because they played entirely to the devs’ strengths, which made the theme an afterthought.
Our winner by unanimous decision was Fine Detective, and I’d like to break down some of the things it did right:
-Its core mechanic was about finding. People are hidden in a crowd, and you have to find them under a time limit, that’s it. There’s nothing extra that you need to do, there’s no side objectives that go off-theme, it’s laser focused on a theme-appropriate gameplay loop.
-The gameplay loop itself was kept fun by gradually escalating difficulty. The core mechanic is simple, but it’s something where you can get better at it with time and practice. The game knows this, and so it starts off slow enough for a beginner to find their legs, then cranks up the heat in steady increments. Because the components of the game are so simple, it’s relatively easy to increase difficulty just by adding more people to the crowd. It naturally introduces more characters with similar features to the ones you’re looking for, so not only is it harder to find people, there’s a bigger chance you choose the wrong person if you’re not being careful. Even when you get used to the game, you need to stay locked-in to do well.
-It anticipated its most potentially frustrating elements. When you spend a certain amount of time looking for someone without being able to find them, the game will highlight an area of the map that the target is inside, narrowing the area you need to search. You don’t want to get to that point since time is money, but the fact that it throws you a lifeline makes it so you don’t ruin a whole run over just one lapse. This feels like a feature that would be added after hearing a ton of feedback, but it was included in the initial release. They had the foresight to see the area where most people would start stressing out and preemptively mitigated it. Just really good design sense.
-Overall polish and a perfect scope. More than one submission came out looking like a finished product, so this wasn’t necessarily the deciding factor, but it certainly didn’t hurt. This is a good game to study for those that found themselves working beyond a reasonable scope and want to calibrate better next time. Look at how Fine Detective turns the constant re-use of its assets into a strength on a gameplay level, but also consider how much that frees up time on a development level. It indicates expert planning all around.
Regarding the future of the event itself:
My first instinct is to always be a hardass about things, so that when people try to bend the rules, they see that I’m meting out righteous unwavering judgment without prejudice or favoritism. I found that to be largely unnecessary. Some rules were bent and softened after determining that no real harm would be done by doing so, and I’ll probably not require so much in future jams.
The biggest thing that I’d revise in terms of the event itself would be the rule against patching game breaking bugs until judging was complete. The intent was to make sure we had a snapshot of exactly what the game looked like at the deadline, but in hindsight I don’t really think it would have had much of an impact on the final judgments. Instead of a benefit, it had the cascade effect of putting pressure on the judges to play everything and make judgments quickly so that devs could patch their games, which led to doubts that we could give every game the time and consideration they deserved. I changed that rule a few days into judging and extended the estimated time for us to give our verdicts, and next time it will be that way from the onset. Any fears I have that this will be abused are probably overblown; anyone that has to resort to cheating is probably not Top 5 material anyway.
I’d like for the Summer Game Jam to continue as an annual event. I think eventually when we’ve had a few under our belt, it can be handled by other folks that want to take a crack at it to keep it fresh. As much as I like running it, I wouldn’t mind getting a chance to compete without it being a conflict of interest. If that doesn’t pan out, maybe I’ll just jam alongside everyone as a non-competitor, I dunno.
Anyway, thanks if you got through all that. See ya next year~
