There’s a topic I figure will eventually come up in video when the jam is over, but it’s come up a few times in reviews and a little above that I figure why not.

Misunderstanding Scope

A lot first-time game jammers enter the game jam with optimism & dreams of making something. The ugly & dirty realities of creation is obscured & forgotten, perhaps ignored. Maybe, there is a lack of awareness through the ignorance of having never brought a completed project to fruition in a limited time. Either way, there’s a misunderstanding or ignorance of scope that manifests in a few ways.

• With TTRPGs, many misunderstand the product expectation. (What goes into a completed adventure?) And the result is something that resembles notes, an outline, or what they would use at the table.
• Some are guided by the grandiosity of an idea that seems epic & cool without consideration for how it will work within the adventure they are writing. This results in scope creep or a disjointedness in the project.
• Some under-estimate the amount of time you need to review, iterate, work through how it would play, etc. The fine-tuning process only happens through play, whether it’s solo play or not. Sometimes a great sounding idea is results in really poor execution because you forgot some mechanic, or there’s an unforeseen application you hadn’t considered.
• Some will under-estimate their skill level, and will need to devote their time to learning new software or finding ways to create the visuals they want for their game jam entry.

There’s a myriad of other reasons, but all of these issues are issues of not managing the scope of your project. It’s a tall order for a lot of people, you really only understand the scope of the project once you do it because you develop experience. As such, I highly recommend you conduct a post-game-jam reflection. What did you want to accomplish? What did you accomplish? How long did it take you for each part? Etc.

Process

Even if you’ve never participated in a game jam before, you can manage scope by focusing on process & adding a few more limitations. How?

First, recognize you need to have some spare time at the end to help you if you are stuck on anything. Devote 1/3 of your time to the unforeseen. If things are smooth sailing, you have 1/3 of your time to polish.

Second, set a very explicit goal. I knew I wanted to do a dungeon crawl adventure with 20 rooms. Why 20 rooms? Kelsey wrote The Hideous Halls of Mugdulblub using 1/3 of the full page for room descriptions. There was no space for monster stat blocks or treasure items on the page. I knew if I wanted to include monster stat blocks and item blocks, I would need 1/3 the page for that. That leaves space for 2 room descriptions per page. I need some pages for cover, setup, legal/credits, etc. So I said 1/3 for all of that, 2/3 of 16 pages for the rooms. That’s 6 pages everything that is not a room description and 10 pages for room descriptions. 10 x 2 = 20 rooms. This is a tight adventure. This is the scope of my project. Before, I started anything, I knew how much space I could use and devote to each element. Then, I did research.

Third, research. Take 1 day and understand your inspirations. What makes them unique and could be reinterpreted into the medium that is a Shadowdark dungeon? Aren’t sure what makes a Shadowdark dungeon unique to other adventures/dungeons, look at examples of that and notice where things are common. If there’s a detail you think is missing but want to add, do so. This portion of the project is letting your brain ram things together so you can get ideas.

Oh, that first idea you had that you thought was killer. Throw it away. It was obvious and likely hot garbage. Some times it’s not, but you only understand what it is if you take time to step away from it. If it’s all you can think about, it’s got some teeth.

How much time you can take depends on how long it takes for you to get the idea. If by day 3, you’ve still got nothing, start working on any idea because you’re going to need to jumpstart the creativity process by crashing ideas together so that eventually create a transformer.

Fourth, start writing. Take a week, write, edit, outline a map, write some more, edit some more.

Fifth, start finalizing. And here, work in the following process: write your final draft, layout, consider where art would go if you get time for it, edit your writing while laying it out to avoid any bad layout issues, map, more editing & layout, art. The number of times I’ve been impressed by quality writing with crap layout or no art dwarfs the number of times I’ve been impressed by mediocre writing made pretty with good art.

Sixth, submit.

It’s not an elaborate process, but it is a process that will help you focus on scope. If this is your first game jam & you completed a project, I highly recommend you take a moment and write down your thoughts about your process. Some things you learnt about how you create. It’ll be useful to know for the next one. Also…

BE PROUD OF YOURSELF

There were only 61 submissions despite over 200 people signing up. You did something nearly 150 people didn’t. That is an accomplishment to be proud of.