The second day began as most days during Global Game Jams begin; an early morning forty minute walk to the venue. This could be a good time to reflect on what we want to achieve in the day, but is a better time to be too tired to say anything and go into the first supermarket for pastries and supplies. This was a day of two halves; as I will go on to explain via the things I learnt from day 2.
1) Keep the game design in mind
Making sure you keep the final game idea in mind whilst you’re coding means that you are always working towards a goal. Whether that goal is the entire game or a small section of it, having idea of how it will look and work means you have an active incentive to see it look like that; it helps encourage you to work both efficiently and quickly towards your goal.
2) If it’s not happening, accept defeat
We went in with high hopes of making a networked Javascript game, Javascript being something we’d dabbled in before in our second year coursework. More importantly, we wanted to avoid XNA (our go to language for game jams). That being said at 1pm on day two with 24 hours to go, we realised that either
a) The game wouldn’t be finished (something that we did not want to happen); or
b) We would finish, but it would be nowhere near as good as it could have been in XNA
So we decided that we would rather try and do well in the competition with a better XNA gme than try and scrape out a Javascript one. We still intend to work on a Javascript game at some point, but probably not during a game jam.
3) Be prepared to get it done
To get the two halves of our game that we had been working on together (me on the networking and Josh on the tile engine) I was ready to keep going until I had them working. After a 2 hour break, I sat down about 12.30 am and didn’t move until 4:30am when I fell asleep on some chairs; at that point I had combined the two halves to make the basis for what would be our final game. Sometimes you can get it all done at normal hours, but sometimes you’ve just got to knuckle down and go for it, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing just something to keep in mind.
Well that about covers it for day 2, I’ll be back with day 3 soon.
Adam
Adam Boyne 
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