Inspiring Creativity through Internal Game Jams

[Music] welcome back to gdc hope you guys had a warm lunch to thaw yourselves out so this is my 11th gdc but my first very first solo talk so i'm really excited to be here my name is pete cooper i am a little bit about myself i'm a pretty hardcore gamer and i have been playing making and designing games my whole life uh this is my at home work studio space i try to make sure i don't have too many distractions so i've been making games for quite a while here's some of the games i've helped ship over the past 15 years i'm also the co-founder and creative director at gamers for good

which is a non-profit organization that i run with my wonderful wife liz who's in the back there with the purple hair hey liz and i've been privileged to be part of the art leadership team at wright games for the past five years alright so i'm here to talk about internal game jams so when keith first asked me to give this talk i was a little surprised because it doesn't seem like it's super art specific um but when i thought about it it is relevant because as as art leaders it's our responsibility to keep our teams creative uh highly motivated and energized uh as well as ensuring they they continuously have great opportunities to learn and grow so before i get ahead of myself i want to make sure everyone here knows what a game jam is is there anybody here who doesn't know hey got one two all right so a standard definition of game jam is uh making games within a super short

time frame uh in most cases it's 48 hours-ish i've seen them go as long as a week and i've seen it go as short as eight hours but it's normally about it's normally a couple days and they normally have a general theme something to constrain the team a little bit so that they have things to collaborate on so what i want to talk about is a little bit different it's something i like to call company jam and what that is it's basically giving cross-discipline groups freedom to try things way outside the box so it doesn't necessarily have to be games but it's basically just finding ways to to get teams doing things now the important thing it needs to also still have this super short time frame and hopefully some general theme or constraint but the cross discipline part is very important uh it's really easy to say hey concept artist spend a couple days concepting whatever you want you'll get

a whole bunch of really cool drawings and that's great but when you when you make a cross-discipline when you combine an engineer an animator a vfx artist you know that unlocks everybody's individual skills and then the sky's the limit on what they can make so for a couple brief examples of how i've seen this work in the past is i worked in the studio called nspace many years ago in orlando and after we shipped the game we were given a few days to try an art prototype so we had full freedom to do whatever we wanted within the constraints of it had to run on the gamecube this was also around the time that doom 3 came out so we also want to try some cool dynamic lighting anyone who's worked on the gamecube knows that's almost impossible and another example is when i worked at blizzard on diablo 3 there was a point where all the designers were all trying to solve a specific problem and a bunch of the rest of us were given a few days to figure out and implement any dungeon

mechanic ideas we wanted we came up with a whole bunch of really cool things and it was really great because when we presented to the designers they were really surprised on what we were able to come up with on our own now the best example i've ever seen of this is something called riot thunderdome and here is a five minute video that will explain it better than i will [Music] throw starts with this jolt of adrenaline three days over 70 teams we've got over 380 people participating in thunderdome it's really about getting teams together to just try kind of moonshot type things if you're doing thunderdome with the people that you work with every day you're doing thunderdome wrong the team and i are taking league of legends characters and we're actually making a fighting game we're working on a project to basically build some robot minions and have them fight so we're working on a game called clash of fates two players playing head to head whoever has the fastest reaction time um

wins up yeah let's go and get all the stuff over there we're gonna try to take six months of work and put it into three days so the planning process needs to be really fast and really tight we're doing something entirely within our day jobs and this is a chance for us to work together on not only something that we can team up and use our skills on but something we can develop new skills together with so do you want to start mocking up ui or anything yeah i mean just anything that we that we need to get to here so first first priority is the health bar thing we had some hiccups with the roombas that we ordered we're a little bit out of date models because we're trying to be on a budget they're actually two months too old to really truly be hackable so that's a really big challenge you should have a rub of something on the screen in it's not just about getting everything done it's about also them playing it and changing it and playing it and changing it it's a cool opportunity to try out new technology play with some stuff that

i've been eyeing in the past few months and really push myself to see what i'll be able to do in the next 48 hours i'll probably take the animations that we tell the first step and we'll see what all the integration steps are got it break okay let's do it day two is just sort of most of the day is just freaking out and wondering if we can get done on time you know it was really great to see the minion molds progressing and like it was starting to really look like minions i sat down and just basically started editing the code that we had done and refactoring that doing the lights blinking and the eyes and the wand for me i don't ever touch code and you know being able to do that and play around with electronics for a couple days was really cool

i'm pretty sure what's going to end up happening is everybody will have something awesome on their own machine and then we'll mash it all together and they're going to be like oh crap frankenstein fighting game okay i really do have to target those little statues but they look like that they're too bright it's like you know can we still get everything done if you stay up all night it's not loading it up start start making the tough choices what's what what's up with the music [Music] oh god [Music] we have time for it uh you should try it i mean if we don't yeah we have an hour and a half left to cut off right now we're just polishing up uh we've been up myself seven jane were here all night last night we're not necessarily the appropriate people to make this type of game by our job title but absolutely by what our passions are is it working best of three as much planning as you do with

creating games you never really know if something's fun until you have your hands on it you know and it that always feels so good when it's like oh my god i played it and it was fun we were changing versions at the very last minute i'm down to the wire on pencils down we're rushing around trying to finish everything and put the finishing touches on the minions both visually and in the code so um trying to finish all that in just a couple hours was a little bit hectic what's up that's working we're like you know what this is what we're going with this is good enough this is our victory dance this is official now the moment of truth wait for it yes [Applause] yes at the end of the dome we have this awesome science fair where everybody

presents the work that they've been doing for the past three days we're a very teamwork-oriented company engineers it's it's programmers it's artists you know audio everything comes together to create these things and it's sort of how we work at riot you know there aren't a lot of barriers between different disciplines everybody crushes together and makes something cool three days ago this was just like an idea in our heads and now it's a thing we're actually playing people get joy out of it that's what i want each thunderdome we try something more and more difficult until one day maybe we'll be doing something that we didn't even imagine we could do [Applause] all right that's thunderdome so

and that's the end of my talk thanks um okay so i want to talk about uh six of my personal thunderdome experiences and what i've learned from them and uh what value i think doing these type of jams for any company has okay so my first thunderdome was about a month after i started at riot this was close to six years ago at this point and i was initially on the environment team so that crew decided that they really wanted to make a new map they wanted to give that a try so we had these seven guys uh and this was our team comp you can probably see some challenges already here so this was super exciting for this is a 48 hour jam and this was very exciting for about the first 15 hours but then you realize okay we're

ultimately this exact same team doing the exact same job and by hour 25 you have people who are had no energy people who are actually fighting amongst themselves and and the inevitable ran out of time uh you know artists are notorious for being horrible at time management at least in my experience so that was that was pretty rough um so lessons learned team composition matters you know having all one discipline was is a pretty bad idea working with new people is is really important you know it it teaches you a lot about teamwork collaboration um finishing something is important we went in saying we're just gonna have fun and whether we get done with something or not it's all good but i could tell everyone on the team was really disappointed because we weren't able to get it done

and producers while i've always appreciated producers i appreciate them a whole lot more during a very tight game jam session of 48 hours uh and it doesn't really have to be a producer per se just someone who's paying attention to the time who's allocating resources appropriately who is people are hitting milestones and it's you know got to have those organized people in place okay so fast forward to the next thunder dome so this was right before uh league of legends all-star break where we have pro players and we have this thing where they some of the pros do one-on-one matches so we decided let's try to make a 1v1 mode during thunderdome and this time we we learned from our mistakes so we we actually had a real team uh with designers engineers producers and qa and audio that was that was good uh so a

few key things that happened uh at the beginning we were thinking about themes what could the themes be and someone had an idea to use magma chamber so for history and magma chamber this was an old map that we were trying to make for players a long time ago a huge map and it ended up getting cancelled for a lot of reasons and there was a lot of disappointed players so someone had the idea of hey let's just redo magma chamber in this and and maybe players will think that's cool um next thing this is my buddy chris haga he's a amazing guy for anyone who knows him uh so chris haga is a super soldier viking and he's like we don't need sleep we're just going all in let's do this by hour 15 uh chris haga was a [ __ ] zombie like he was completely useless uh he was the the sole vfx artist on the team um i hope he's here

but anyway we we were trolling him by just asking him hey when you're going to have that lava fall in that he was working on and he kept saying i'll get it in in 10 minutes we would ask him in an hour and he'd say the same thing i don't even think he had any understanding of time for about a 10 hour gap so that that didn't work out too well um but besides that we did have a producer and other than chris haga like we were able to to allocate resources properly get everything working and that was fantastic we weren't stressed about anything because someone was paying attention to everything that had to get done and another thing was at six a.m my awesome wife brought us breakfast burritos one day and that was pretty amazing thanks liz so here is the the map we ended up with uh we wanted this was the magma chamber dark lava theme there's chris haga's lava falls he actually managed to get in uh so this was this was pretty cool we

were really happy with it we had fun making it and and overall it was great uh but something we realized is there was another team that was doing something that would that they were having even more fun with uh so this is a character on the left uh hecarim in league of legends uh he's like a dark shadow isles centaur evil dude and one of the crews had the idea of doing a skin an arcade skin line which is really over the top silly stuff and during and there was producers at the company who didn't think this was a great idea so they used thunderdome to prove it and during the development of this uh these guys were having a blast i mean they were making 8-bit pixel vfx uh we we could go by and hear all the silly-ass sound effects they were trying to make all these bee boo bops and i mean rainbow unicorn horns and they were just having such a great time and and that was that was a pretty eye-opening experience so while this was really great it made

me realize okay this is tonally pretty similar to what we regularly do we do a lot of fun silly stuff but i'd say 90 of it is kind of in the serious a little more serious space uh so this is where i decided that going forward we want to do more light-hearted stuff another thing that happened is uh some players thought the magma chamber thing was cool other players not so much uh because we promised this huge thing and then ended up canceling it uh then when we showed them this tiny little thing that we made look we brought magma chamber back they're like [ __ ] that's that's not that's not it so they were they were pretty disappointed in that and then we weren't actually able to ship this mode to them we were trying to but we had server issues so we couldn't get it done so they were double upset about that so lessons learned this time number one sleep is good that kind of sounds like a no-brainer but

i've seen a lot of people try to do game jams and try to do the all-nighter thing and sometimes it works out great but every time i've seen people just go home sleep come back fresh you end up getting a lot more done anyway player expectations you know if you promise something to players don't surprise them by saying look we made it something else isn't that cool team size doesn't matter when you have organized people this we thought this team was a little large it was 10 people so we were a little concerned but it ended up working out perfectly fine because someone was paying attention someone was organized and finally theme and tone can affect work tone so because you're in such a tight time frame i feel like doing more lighthearted things keeps the entire tone of the project and then tone of the team in a much happier place okay so next time on thunderdome this time we decided

let's make a map skin all right so for a little context this is aram this is a mode in league of legends 5v5 single lane and this is alex gonzalez one of my good buddies and amazing concept artists and one monday he comes to work and says hey check this out it is drawing over the weekend i think it would be really cool if we made a map skin of aram what do you think of this i'm like wow this is really cool this is awesome we've never done a map skin before maybe we should try that i'll talk to the production crew and see if somewhere down the line we can get this on a schedule somewhere and he's like well thunderdome's coming up how about we just do it for thunderdome and my initial reaction was like what that's look at how much content that is that's insanity and then i was looking at i'm like you know there's there's a lot of stuff that's kind of duplicated you know we may be able to pull it off but we're gonna need a pretty big team if we're gonna do it so we decided all right let's just see how

big a team we could make so we we got a team of 25 people i believe 20 of the 25 were artists this is a very art heavy experiment so a couple couple key things that happened um so right before it started i went to party city and bought a whole bunch of stupid pirate props i bought foam swords and hats and eye patches doubloons actually found i was shocked they had uh a pirate ship pinata i was like sweet it's perfect uh so in order to try to try to keep the fun going i wanted to do that and that actually really helped this was really important say yes to everything so one of our jobs as leaders is actually to not specifically shoot down ideas but we have to we have to block a lot of crazy things from going into our products because we have a cohesive vision that we have to uphold

so during game jam scenarios this is an amazing opportunity to let people put in whatever crazy absurd nutty ideas they want to so anytime anyone walked up to me and said hey what do you think of this like that sounds ridiculous let's do it and this is actually where i fell in love with whiteboards um there was a point so there was huge concern 20 artists we're going to be stepping on each other's toes left and right this is going to be a total disaster and i've never been able to get artists to use jira or or trello or any of these damn tracking things any artist here like jira are you a tech artist all right so so tim hill our producer at the time uh he rolled in a white board and is like

guys just write down all the [ __ ] you want to do and just just write it all down on the board and then just put your name next to the thing you're putting in and when you check it in cross it off and that was phenomenal that was the most amazing eye-opening thing um because any time anyone can get up you just look over and say oh hey steve's working on the the river and bob's working on x and y and it was it was really great we stopped a lot of people from stepping on each other's toes and and that made me fall in love with white boards and i've used them ever since so here's a video of our production so we started by stripping everything out of the map and then we did a build every couple hours that showed all the crap that was going in so man we put in so much stuff into this it was pretty nutty how fast it went in and i ripped the audio out of this because i asked someone for this video and i think they trolled me by putting

the pirates of the caribbean old ride theme on it and it was super obnoxious so yeah we made all new nexuses turrets minions just tons and tons of content we actually figured out a new tech that we ended up using in the future things like rotating turrets lots of destruction made a new mini map in the bottom corner people are just throwing in all sorts of stuff i don't even know what that is yeah there's the rotating turrets that was really cool um this was a really neat thing someone put in the two boats and they made it so when one of the red side turrets gets destroyed the blue ship shoots and when the and vice versa and then when the last turret gets destroyed that ship goes down so there was just a lot of people trying brand new things that nobody knew how we would make them

work and it was great nobody was saying no to anything we were all just trying to get stuff in and then here's this great illustration made by beaulieu in about 12 hours he's awesome all right so my lessons learned from this is big teams are awesome like we were really concerned about how large this team was and it worked out super well so we're like sweet there's no downside as long as you have organized people you can you can make it happen prioritizing having fun was a really big win like everyone had a great time the whole time uh whiteboard tracking for the win holy [ __ ] i love whiteboards as you can tell from this talk um and yes to all ideas and not just yes to all ideas it's one thing to give someone permission to do a thing it's another thing to be really supportive about it so if someone comes up it's like hey i got this idea cool not only can you get it in what can i do to support you

from getting it in you know can i help you make a model can i help you animate something and that was that was a big win and we also found out we can make a ton of content really quickly after this thunderdome we had people from all over the company coming up and saying how are you moving so fast how can we how can we figure out how to get this type of urgency this type of speed into our regular daily jobs we surprised a lot of people on the team and outside the team and that was that was really fantastic and this is where i decided that i want to change goals for how i want to go forward with thunderdome so one of the things and i love riot but one of the issues that i have is we have a lot of people who kind of fall into the paralysis by analysis camp we have philosophical debates about you know the the trim of a frame on an

icon sometimes uh so i wanted to use thunderdome to show people and remind people how quickly we can move how fast we can make decisions so here are some of the goals that we've moved forward with make games without over planning do as little pre-production as we possibly can coming going pretty blind and see what we can do on the fly get lots of people involved i wanted to grab people from all over the company to make sure we're working with lots of new people and exposing as many people to this type of jams as possible and finally push people out of their comfort zones try to get people learning try to get everyone learning something new every time we do one of these jams okay so fast forwarding so we've done a bunch of modes uh some maps a lot of these little things we're like all right this time we're just gonna straight up make a game let's see what we can do so someone came with a very basic idea of

a minion side scroller and then i was like cool that's a great idea let's leave it at that and of course people want to oh well let's plan some stuff out no no no stop that's it that's no planning don't do it uh caught a couple people trying block them stop it burn that let's not do it okay so we actually ended up with another 25 person team it wasn't the same we had about 10 people from the old team and about 15 new people we actually grabbed a couple people that this was like their first week at riot brand new people so lots of new faces um we found a room that had a gigantic white board which was awesome i was like okay right when it starts we have a beginning because minions started a crystal then they go to the other side crystal so we have a beginning of the end of the game now everyone just throw out whatever ideas come to mind what do you guys want to see in the game and so we did this ridiculous brainstorm of hey let's throw some minions in there let's have an epic forest vista let's drop anivia the iceberg in there and have her drop ice walls and we'll throw zigs throwing bombs and have cannon

minions and have nautilus in mid lane smashing 100 minions and then you go into the jungle and there's crabs and and people just threw out a million ridiculous absurd ideas and then you blow up the crystal at the end after you fight a super mech minion and i was like all right sweet now we have 40 something hours where's the producer to organize this uh so 40 hours of development some really cool things happened uh first off uh we decided to do flash style 2d 2d style development this is primarily because no one on the team has ever done this so we wanted to get people learning new things and this was amazing with in the first few hours there was constantly people going hey i figured out how to do this thing and then five other people crowd around them and go oh sweet i see now i get it we had concept artists learning new things animators everyone across the board was was learning a brand new way to build

things uh this was the first time we purposely kicked everyone out we're like all right uh we we probably had one or two people who did a couple the the super lights or all-nighters but the vast majority of everyone were like go home get a good night's sleep 9 or 10 p.m you know take off and then come in the morning fresh and it worked out really well another thing is we spent so much time focusing on learning and putting a million things in the game that we forgot about the all-important thing of uh iterating uh we had zero time so the the game was put together it was frankenstein together at the very very last minute so uh we're like we don't know if this game is any good so here's a video of course you got to start with that screen so we made this really cool intro i love motion graphics people they're hot so we started as a single player game and then like five minutes before ended

yeah let's just do multiplayer why not so we just had this super fun silly minion game and no time to animate anivia throw her up in the air and shoot sweet all right so this video is really long so i'm just going to take screenshots so you fight [ __ ] tons of minions you fight a cannon minion then you have nautilus and then you go into a jungle we made a ton of different environments you fight the epic crab boss and then you go to the river where you fight piranhas and all sorts of other crap and then you go to the other outside and you fight towers and then here's the ultra minion mech and there's a ton of stuff between this and then you go to the nexus and then garen comes in and takes the last hit and takes credit for the win um that's why it's called last hit uh so this was this was a pretty amazing

experience and there's some really good lessons learned from this uh number one we can make a game with almost no planning and that was that was really cool to see uh it surprised a lot of people on the team and i think it woke up a lot of people to to that reality uh number two no crunch needed um you can totally you know get some sleep you know prioritize you can do jams without doing all-nighters you know it's totally doable uh accelerated learning for the win i think this is the the biggest amazing lesson like we all know people on our teams who say oh you know i really want to learn this new program i really want to learn this new thing i'm going to put it on my six month you know personal development plan and hopefully i'll find time to do tutorials and then two years later they still don't know it um so forcing people to learn things during during a game jam is amazing because you only have two days you're going to learn it because all these other people

are counting on you to learn it so no one wants to let the team down so uh that's a pretty amazing thing and finally uh this game kind of sucks uh because we just didn't think of it as a game for some reason uh we just didn't think about iterating on it all right so fast forward this time let's make a good game with no planning so one of the things i realized afterwards is we didn't do a lot of planning but because we already had a theme everyone already kind of had in their mind all right we know what it's going to look like we know we know the characters you know so this time no theme no nothing zero planning other than we did say we want to make a twin stick shooter but that is it this time we brought in a bunch more people i was actually inviting people who've never made games before at this point i'm inviting people from hr from facilities finance like come on who

wants to who wants to help learn something to make a game let's let's do it so when when thunderdome started we had a vote we just had everyone in a room and say okay let's vote on who what themes you guys want to make what's the characters what's the environment uh see if we can make a game designed by committee and still actually have it be good so so like i said before we were asking a lot of other people and also this time well one of the things that stops people from doing thunderdome at riot is people are really busy you know so there's like a big commitment to say okay i'm gonna go ahead and do the whole end of the week i'm just committing to thunderdome so a lot of people have meetings a lot of people have end of the week milestones are still trying to hit so this time i just said you know what if you can dedicate any time an hour two hours if you just want to stay one evening it doesn't even matter like

anything you want to contribute that's awesome like you can totally be part of the team so another cool thing is we had a cool twin stick shooter up and running pretty pretty quickly but we didn't have any really interesting unique mechanic um and i believe it was one of the guys on the merch team who actually came up with the idea of having like these these tetris style blocks falling into the play space and creating blockers and that was really cool so this is my buddy warren who is a phenomenal animator he doesn't look anything like this he doesn't wear glasses or ties or anything i just love this picture um and the late in the second day he walks up to me and says hey we're just about done with all of the animation of the game uh i want to try making an intro cutscene thing and i'm like okay so you're saying i'm like do you have a plan he's like no like okay awesome so the next couple hours you want to

plan storyboard animate find audio support to get an intro into the game all right let's let's see if we can make it happen and actually did and liz made us some awesome arcade themed cupcakes thanks again liz my wife she's amazing so here's uh video hell yeah arcade this is where we were voting looks like our mvp is going to be lucian jinx [Music] super arcade gunners 2 z something so we're voting on names some of the dumbest names oh [ __ ] five minutes [Music] good morning everybody whoa that's loud welcome to day two day two of making a

[ __ ] game so here we are wow wednesday is dead bow 9 a.m is dead we'll call that 10. just kidding 10 is dead where are we at 10 41 to 1 o'clock all right who's the engineers how much time we got someone who knows matt tell me how much time we got we actually made t-shirts that was pretty funny so we found out one of the people's sos makes has a side t-shirt company so like can we just get t-shirts made like right now who's got a graphic let's do it and that was fun and here's a the actual story trailer and gameplay [Music] thing

zero iteration was the name of our team just kind of trolling ourselves [Music] this was like a smash tv kind of thing the garen gun fires spinning gearings all right that was my first attempt at pixel art someone's like hey we need to cover oh yeah pixel art that'll take about an hour yeah i was wrong so lessons learned uh pixel art is [ __ ] hard

uh bonus props to everyone who makes pixel art i i was surprised i've never actually done it before next thing is part-timers welcome that was a really big win letting people join who it just basically alleviated anyone from having an excuse to not join in right it's like hey if you have two hours if you have a lunch break come on and learn something real quick have fun this is an obvious one the best ideas can come from anyone i mean everyone knows that but it's really great when there's super clear examples to point out to people and anyone can help make games like i mean we really we really had all sorts of people on the team who aren't even game developers join in learn how to animate something real quick learn how to do a vfx learn how to implement a model uh that was that was really great to see all right and for the final one

we decided let's see if we can make and ship a game with players so here's the pitch it was we're gonna come up with five different game types and a whole bunch of themes and create a survey put it on the league of legends forums and let players vote on what it is uh and we'll let we'll have the voting end the minute thunderdome starts so there's zero chance for any pre-production whatsoever so we know what it is that we're making right when it starts uh talk to players live so give players live updates uh give them builds take their feedback and then the goal is to build finish and ship a game in 48 hours so we wanted to have it up for anyone to download and play by the time thunderdome ended at this point i have no idea how big the team is i think someone brought in their mom at one point

it was it was massive i don't i don't even know how we organized that so here's here's the the thing we we threw up on the forum so yeah we had the the five different game types infinite runner match 3 2d platformer gallery shooter in a rhythm game i was really pulling for rhythm game but the vote ended up being 2d platform in the arcade theme arcade theme is popular you know thanks to that team thunderdome back in the day all right so let's just hop right into one of the dev videos it's great having people who are recording [ __ ] for you [Music]

[Applause] [Music] oh this is the little end sequence which you get when you win the game doran's ring that is a shitty item for anyone who doesn't play league it's a great starter item i shouldn't say shitty [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music]

my job is to stand over people as you can see [Music] all right so despite having getting everyone to spend time communicating with players getting feedback all the enemies in the game were originally concepted by just some random people on the forums which was really great and then we were translating the game despite that this was inc this went really really smooth it was actually strange i remember looking over at our head producer blake when we're about halfway through going why is this going so well

normally stuff is on fire like things are breaking left and right we have people putting things in that have never put anything in before so you know what that looks like but this went crazy smooth and that was that was amazing and here is our actual game trailer [Music] with what uh this is what it ended up [Music] being [Music] all right so lessons learned number one planning is overrated um i mean obviously this is a gross generalization

but um you know we proved multiple times that teams can absolutely make things without any kind of pre-production just making things on the fly and it's it's absolutely doable and it actually greatly raises teams confidence level in themselves and their abilities engaging with players is is amazing that was that was a really really great thing interacting with your audience is hugely beneficial um i i believe it it actually keeps and creates long-term fans um and just that was it actually made me want to start streaming myself um it was really great to just be part of the be part of the actual player community um and we proved that we could kind of accomplish anything so that was that was really great okay so before i end i want to talk quickly about uh some game jam resources now not every studio

um has the resources of a ride games or or you know has the ability to to actually make a giant thunderdome style thing happen but there's a lot of great resources out there that exist that can help figure out how to make a game jam possible one great thing is i can't talk about game jams without talking about global game jam global game jam is this amazing worldwide game jam that happens every january um and it's huge so as of february 24th the day i made this slide there was 42 811 people registered at 803 jam sites located in 108 countries around the world so global game jam is is really massive so here's some of the posters that are made for the different locations so there's mexico and singapore and i had to represent portland that's my my

jam site here's some pictures of some of the the people who are at these jam sites some of them are small there's 15 people and other ones have hundreds of people that show up to do this so global game jam is an amazing thing uh and there's there's ways you can help by simply you know letting if if you can just have your like global amgm happens over the weekend so if you can get office to just sponsor a global game jam for your teams uh that'll be a really amazing thing for them you could also do simple things like sponsoring with supplies snacks and t-shirts um you can even do a thing where allowing your people to go to global game jam over a weekend and then giving them a month the next monday off and that would be the only thing you actually have to do yourself is eat one day now global game jam always happens the same time in january but there's game jams

happening all the time so this is a site called game jams on itch io and this is a huge calendar and it's always full of [ __ ] tons of game jams that are going on at any time and anyone can uh can just hop in and join there's one on the far right that was called no [ __ ] sherlock jam that was one i wanted to join i have no idea what that theme is but that's cool there's another site called indiegamejams.com and when i made this there was over 50 game jams happening at the time i was making this presentation so game jams are always going on so for closing thoughts so i've seen firsthand uh how amazing game jams are for building teamwork skills with individuals so much amazing creative problem solving happens on the fly during these

time management like huge improvements myself and everyone on my team who's done this learns how to really focus on getting things done in a very timely manner it also builds it also gives people fresh perspective i mean a lot of us work on these huge games that take sometimes years and years to make so allowing your teams a couple days to just kind of make something from scratch separate themselves from the product for a couple days it really gives them i think it can really give them a very fresh perspective and and help them out um sense of accomplishment is huge also like we all a lot of us work on games that get cancelled or again take a long time to make being able to say our goal is to make something really quickly in two days uh and having it done finished and everyone's relieved and excited about that and finally creative freedom you know we can't all

let all of our people throw in all their crazy ideas but game jams are an amazing opportunity to let that happen creative freedom is super important for creative people so finding these small windows to make sure your teams can do whatever wild thing they want is is really important and they'll appreciate it all right and that's all i got so thank you very much oh one thing i forgot um please silence your phones thanks uh and please fill out the survey uh so we can get some feedback and now it's time for q a if anyone has any questions at all i'll leave up the the resources and the last one is gamersforgood.com my nonprofit organization if anyone has any questions or wants any ideas for how they can get their teams involved in game jams hit me up i'd be

glad to help you with that hello um when do you do them like on the week on the weekends what like uh it's really whatever works for you i mean most game jams are actually happening on the weekend yeah like at riot at riot we do it during the week so we have we start at noon on wednesday and we end noon on friday thanks yep and we we try to do them about twice a year thanks for the the talk was great um i see you guys you put together big teams how do you guys go or how do you go about breaking those teams into smaller pods or into smaller teams that could work together do you guys just all work on things individually well we we make sure when we start we make sure we have some type of very basic leadership structure

where it's like okay we know we want to have someone in charge of making sure the characters are getting in the game you know someone makes sure uh you know we definitely have a lead producer everyone knows who that is and then based on the size of the team we try to have a few of those uh so for the most part it's pretty just chaotic everyone's everyone figures out where they kind of fit in and where they can slot in and then the producer guides the team to on time is he the guy that's is there someone that's basically going hey can we get this by 2 pm yes yes absolutely that's that's what the producers did all right they're basically saying hey guys here's the whole project sure we can keep throwing [ __ ] in but some of this other stuff is getting cut so we put it all out there and then you know it's like cool you guys want to add a new submarine awesome this other thing is gone right thank you so i have a question um one of the kind of points throughout with these different examples was this sort of danger of paralysis

analysis and the danger of over planning these things and um that kind of stuff but i wonder like with examples you gave a lot of these are kind of known genres that uh people like people know what a twin stick shooter is and what a 2d platformer is how much um do you think that helped and can you speak to how that benefited the process well i mean a 2d platformer is is still a pretty broad thing um uh but yeah it definitely helps it definitely helps to have some kind of very small basic constraint so people have something to rally around because if you don't have that you know you'll be spending the very beginning of a game jam or even a game cycle just fighting over are we making an open world thing or we're making a fishing simulator like what are we doing so i definitely think having at least a genre uh or just some kind of thing in place at the start uh is is really going to save time okay thanks well hello i think that was a very interesting talk and also especially

like kind of like to foment the creativity inside the team and also like get to know the people inside inside the team i think that's really informative about that um was like more about like um even though you say that in these jumps like planning may not be necessary uh but i think there's also like a sense of scope right so how do you keep the scope so then you can actually finish the game by the end of the 48 hours uh we normally don't worry about scope at the start we just kind of let people go insane and then about halfway through we just start killing things you know just sure go ahead balloon out of control and then it's going to end up getting rained back in at the end we actually end up making a ton of content that doesn't get in uh and that's fine that's just part of the process okay thank you hey how's it going pete great talk thank you appreciated it um is it okay to ask a two-parter is that not allowed

uh for you yes oh you only okay thank you for that okay um okay so the first part is uh so on the very first thunderdome how did you convince or how how was management convinced vince that it'd be okay to take 10 to 20 people out of production uh and to work on something that wasn't product related like how did we how did how did right justify that cost you're talking about just thunderdome in general thunderdome in general yeah like that first one like obviously over time it proved it had value but on the first one how how was it just a leap of faith well i wasn't there for the very first thunderdome my my first arnold was thunderdome 2. um but i think it what i believe is it's it's really about people are working on a game like league of legends which is a gigantic game and it's very easy like they're doing the same job over and over um and so uh the desire and need for a different creative outlet for for the

people i think is just really important and that was that was recognized cool uh and the second part is um the things that you learned over these five or so thunder domes like all these awesome learnings that you got do they scale to a larger team or do they only work in small 40-something teams i think they scale infinitely yeah i think there's okay yeah cool thanks pete sorry i mean is there is there something more specific here yeah well it seems as though a lot of times your findings were planning is overrated right like and i know that that was a gross generalization you said that but um it seems like you just get a bunch of really creative people that are super passionate and just let it rip like and they're confident in what they're doing and they all have a shared vision it means that all really it takes like is it is it well i guess what i'm asking is how do you maintain that alignment of

vision across larger groups of people so that they know exactly what they're making are you talking about for a game jam or for a game product i'm talking about game product like do these game jam methodologies apply to product uh i think they do to some degree but a lot of what this is is about doing something absurd most of the stuff is not shippable content you know it's just doing something fun something super creative building confidence for your team making sure they're aware that hey if i needed to make a model with zero planning in one day i totally could do that um so i don't think a lot of this translates directly to like aaa products yeah but it's really just about giving teams the opportunity to collaborate with new people to uh build confidence in their abilities to you know just have and that's what they take back to their desk like when it's all said and done they take back the experience the camaraderie the you know the ability and confidence

in themselves that they can make something really really super fast right yeah yeah and it's also just the the kind of reboot you know you work on the same thing every single day you know you you it's very easy to just kind of you know get into that mental funk you know so just taking a couple days and doing something totally different can help reset you creativity cool thanks pete creatively uh hi there pete this was a great talk um thanks i was wondering if there were any specific methods of brainstorming that you used yeah yeah we used uh a lot of whiteboards which were awesome i'm not starting a whiteboard company or anything but um yeah we really just we did a lot of whiteboard brainstorming where we just grabbed a few people and said hey this is going to be the crew that needs to do this one part of this let's sit down and talk about what we want to do and all right how much time do we have and we just scribble it all out and then

we put names on everything that's the most important thing put names to every task or that one floating task with no name on it is going to be floating and never get done so yeah it's just really writing things down awesome thank you oh hey pete oh man it's loud sick talk also great irelia teaser i saw that that was neat um so i'm actually a student and i participated in global game jam myself and a few other itch jams so i'm wondering um what would you say some of the benefits of doing them when you're still kind of are trying to get your foot in the door compared to like when you're in a company what kind of like do you think there's like a huge benefit from maybe starting these projects and then expanding them uh possibly into like bigger projects that you can show off for your own work i guess what i'm saying is um when you're kind of like when you're still like learning and you kind of get together with a bunch of people that are still learning compared to like when all of you are like already professionals what's some of the benefits of that compared to like um

when you're already like you're out there compared like when you're still trying to squeeze your way through the door oh there's there's huge benefits for students doing game jams uh one of the biggest problems i see with students regularly is they don't know how to collaborate you know they they don't work within each other and they also uh they scope out of control you know like i've seen so many student projects that are like i'm a student i'm making an mmo by myself like what are you what are you doing so uh that constraint of you know a couple days you know is absolutely fantastic and and it'll ensure you're collaborating and you're getting something done so you'll learn as a student learning time management is fantastic i don't think i've ever hired someone out of school who has any understanding of time management so please do that yeah all right thank you very much you know i'm sorry hey um great talk i was wondering how do

you motivate people for game jumps or stuff like this you know it's it's quite common in the video games industry that people lose motivation to try new things or like get out of their comfort zone and they tend to be very hard to motivate and that is a great opportunity to you know get people to do new stuff and i was wondering if you had any advice to give or any any opinion on that oh absolutely i mean i think i think the best motivation is leading by example you know if if you're a leader of a crew and you suggest doing a game jam and they're like i don't really want to do it yourself uh join another crew and then show bring it back to work say hey this is what we made this was great this is what i learned do a presentation about it talk about it say look at all the benefits that come from this so i just think leading by example is is the is the ultimate motivator okay thank you

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