Last month I ran PROCJAM, the first procedural generation game jam. It was an awesome time – we recorded a day of amazing talks by procedural generation experts, we had a lively hashtag full of incredible experiments, and at the end of the jam everyone had 142 (and counting!) entries to play, use and learn from. Here’s a little report, and a little about what I learned from the jam, as a way of summing up a really great week.
Firstly, our day of talks hosted at Goldsmiths in London went really well. We streamed live on Twitch to hundreds of viewers throughout the afternoon, which let people from halfway around the world ask questions to our speakers. And the talks and speakers were amazingly, embarassingly good – I can’t express enough thanks to them for taking so much time to prepare and come and give their talks. Please make sure you check them out online! They contain a whole variety of wisdom and thoughts from artists, developers, researchers and more.
We had some hiccups on the day – no internet at first for our attendees (they pulled through bravely!) and some catering issues. We had to shuffle some talks around and had to bear with some technical problems during a few talks as well. Overall, though, the talks came off really well and provided a nice motivation for everyone entering the jam. Lots of people referenced the talks when tweeting about their jam entries which was a great sign too. Lots of jams already open with keynotes, like Ludum Dare, but I think a mini talk day is a nice alternative where it’s possible. Of course we were fortunate enough to get university hosting and a small catering budget thanks to PROSECCO – not all jams can stretch to that! But maybe the standard keynote format could be changed, with multiple YouTube talks uploaded instead, to offer the same kind of inspiration? I’d love to see more jams do this.
I had some specific aims for PROCJAM beyond just getting people to jam on a cool topic. As you may know if you’ve read The Saturday Papers or seen some of the other things I post on this site, I’m really interested in breaking through the walls that surround lots of academic work, and connecting researchers with indie developers, gamers and anyone else who might be interested in what we do. I made some specific decisions in how I described and set the ‘rules’ for PROCJAM, and although the result is that it didn’t really follow the classic game jam format, I think it made it a better event. Here are some of the deviations I made from the ‘classic’ Ludum Dare-style jam lineup:
You can use existing code including entire games – I think this is really important for doing jams with an experimental twist. If you’re worried about rating people then a common starting point is good, but if not then lifting this restriction lets people come in and develop interesting ideas on top of an existing game. This is really important! Imagine if you want to revolutionise the turn-based strategy genre with a new procedural twist for PROCJAM. You can’t make a whole game as well as your new idea. You need to come in with a game ready to build on. Let people do this.
You don’t need to make a game, or even contribute to games – I think this one really threw some people off, but it also attracted a lot of people to PROCJAM. We’ve become a bit obsessed with the jam format requiring game development only. By opening PROCJAM up beyond games, the jam attracted Twitter bot creators, artists, musicians, researchers from assorted computer science fields and more. Why is this valuable? For PROCJAM it meant getting lots of different perspectives on generation, and letting people with different expertises get involved and contribute their knowledge. We want new ideas, new ways to use procedural generation, and for that you need new people to meet, share ideas with, and learn from. Thanks to everyone who took the plunge to take part in PROCJAM as a first-time jammer.
There aren’t really deadlines… – Shout out to Sophie Houlden for teaching me this valuable lesson about good jamming. Time limits help people focus, but they don’t help everyone, and people have different needs. The first thing I did was make sure the official jam times included two weekends, so people with normal jobs could find the time to take part. But some people needed to start earlier, so why not? Some needed to finish later. Some people, as I write this, are still finishing their PROCJAM entries. And that’s okay. The people who needed the time pressure and community got that, and the people who needed space to finish something got that too.
Everyone’s a winner! – PROCJAM doesn’t have ratings. This was a double-edged sword but it makes all of the above bulletpoints possible and it alleviates pressure on people who are first-timers, or self-conscious, or just not interested in competition. If you remove deadlines, let people use old code, and don’t require everyone to make the same thing, then you can’t really declare winners. But I think this was a key thing in bringing people in and enabling the jam to be more fluid and interesting.
There are some other points I think but these are the four that are most worth mentioning. I’m not claiming that these are general rules for all game jams, of course, but I think that if you want to bring more people into your jam, or the topic of your game jam is more experimental and unusual, then these things might be worth trying out to see how they change your jam’s entrants and the perception of the jam by other people.
Some of these changes brought new problems. Lovely journalists covering the event understandably wanted to know when the entries would be ready to look at, but of course, some entries are still coming in so we’ve missed out on them to some extent. Without ratings it’s hard to show the ‘cream of the crop’ for people without much time who just want a taste of the jam. And if people can use existing code, it’s hard to identify what the new work was that was done during the jam. But I think we’ll find solutions to all of these problems (if some of them even are problems) over time. Overall, I’m still thrilled with how the jam worked out.
I have some more words to say about PROCJAM but they’re probably for another time. So let me finish by thanking everyone who took part, who encouraged others to take part. Thanks to all the people who chipped in helping with bits of the event like Azalea who was on-site on the day, and Kate who ran a stream from the other side of the world. Thanks to Adriel, Merritt, Gritfish, Alan, Guilherme and Stephen for feedback and input on making this jam good in the first place. I have lots of plans to make it even better next year, and even more accessible, hopefully.