So there’s another game jam this weekend, and I thought I’d write up some goals.

And as I was writing, I thought to myself, it’s not about goals as in a desired destination as in having having successfully created a project with specific features at the end of the weekend. The goal is to learn. The end product is irrelevant. If I make something cool and fun, great, but the goal is always to learn.

Right now, there are some very specific things I need to learn to do better, and I’m more interested in constraints than goals right now.

So here are a handful constraints for myself:

I will work in an existing genre.

FPS, RTS, platformer, whatever seems most appropriate; I just don’t want to do my usual approach of finding an idea that fits the theme and then trying to invent the perfect mechanic that fits the idea. Instead, I want to concentrate on figuring out how to to add the right tweaks to the tropes of a well known genre to create something that feels fresh. I want, to some extent, to have experience fighting against my chosen mechanics.

I will not make procedural levels.

This is the most important one. Every one of my previous game jam entries has included procedural levels, and while it’s always an interesting challenge to write the code that writes those levels, I really, really need some experience doing more traditional level design and thinking about the overall structure of a game. I want to spend less time writing procedural level-building code and more time visually evaluating and editing levels in Unity’s level editor, learning about what makes a good level.

If there is music, it will be very minimal.

Instead, I’d like to concentrate on creating a sense of place and mood via sound effects. I could certainly use more practice with music composition, but I need even more practice with sound design.