A couple weeks ago, my wife and I participated in a game jam. It was my sixth (I think), and her first.

So it’s time for a postmortem. Since I have lot to say (as usual), this will be broken up into multiple posts.

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You can download PC and Mac versions of our game here. (Note: the goal is to collect objects by clicking on them, and then click on the rocketship. Sadly, that’s not explained anywhere.)

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Like all game jams, I wanted to approach the jam with a mindset I hadn’t tried in a jam before: this time, I was going to go in planning to work with someone else — that someone else being my wife Marie.

Marie and I have been married thirteen years. Our first date was in 1996. Which is all just to say, we’ve been together a very long time and are already a working team of sorts. There was no question in my mind that we would get along as game jam partners. (Not that I didn’t occasionally imagine big scary robots coming to destroy us if we were not an effective team.)

The big question to me was, could we figure out the logistics of completing a project together?

I’m happy to report that the answer is yes. 🙂

Pregaming

A few days before the jam even started, we tried to come up with ideas for projects we could theoretically work on together, regardless of theme. I started by looking at the skills we were likely to use, the skills we each use on our own side projects: I do modeling, programming and music composition; Marie is a fiction writer.

My first thought was, we’d do a text adventure. I’d write an engine and parser in HTML/Javascript or something, and Marie would do the story planning, written scene descriptions, dialogue and wiring… it seemed like a perfect fit; Marie is a writer, after all…

…and then, much to my embarrassment, I realized I was underestimating Marie. We could do something more ambitious than that.

Marie is a software developer.

Just like me.

She doesn’t program for fun like I do, but Marie is a professional unix sysadmin and web programmer. And while I think of Unity, the game engine I use,  as something you use by yourself, it is very well designed for shared, team projects. So we could collaborate on a more modern 3d video game here. With that in mind, we came up with the following options:

• A text adventure. Still an option, as mentioned previously: I could do the engine from scratch and Marie could do the story and writing.
• A Myst clone. I would produce a level — models, set up in Unity, almost everything visual — and separately, Marie could design puzzles and write the text of the clue-filled journals you get in Myst games.
• Something tile-based. I would produce generic ‘building block’ type assets for a game world, with settings and wiring points that Marie could adjust. Marie would then do the level design, set-up in Unity and any writing/dialogue that was needed.

With all of these options, the workflow (from my point of view) would be similar:

1. Marie is in charge of game & level design.
2. Marie requests new assets or changes to existing assets.
3. I produce assets in a sandbox level in Unity.
4. As soon as they’re remotely functional, I share new assets with Marie. (And any previously existing assets I’ve updated in my sandbox get automatically updated in Marie’s real game level.)
5. Marie uses the assets to construct the real game level in Unity.
6. Repeat 2-5 throughout the weekend.

So we set up a free SVN repository on Assembla and started on a simple maze test project just to get used to the workflow.

By the time we were done, it looked like it was going to work. Marie got to lead the project, and I got to make pretty things without worrying about level design. We could work on our separate laptops, in separate Unity levels, and update to or from SVN whenever needed. It was simple and pretty frictionless. I was very excited about our options — and more excited about doing a game jam than I’d ever been before.