[Monday Musings] The One-Hour Game Jam, ft. Quantum Reflections

     Welcome to TwistedSpoon Studio! This week we're back with another Monday Musing, and this one is near and dear to my heart: the One-Hour Game Jam. It's exactly what it says on the tin. That's all for this week!

 

The Tin

    Okay, maybe there's a little more to say about it. The One-Hour Game Jam is not a competition, so much as a game design exercise. You have one hour to make a playable game. Notice that I said "playable." I didn't say "great," "perfect," or "Spiel des Jahres." You're aiming for minimum viable product-- think of whatever you end up making as a rough sketch of a game.

    This whole practice is inspired by the podcast Unplaytested. The premise is simple: every week, they make an RPG in an hour, based on a randomly selected theme. It's a master course in building games fast and loose, and it's well worth a listen.

    When you have an idea for a game, it's easy to fixate on it. What are the features? What kinds of characters will there be? How many different types of tokens will there be? But all too often, one question is forgotten:

    Is it fun?

    "Of course it's going to be fun!" you might think. " This idea is awesome! I'll make it fun!" Friends, I'm here to tell you, it's not that easy. And if you spend hours or days making something before actually playing it, you're going to be disappointed.

    Or maybe you have ideas for games, but you've never made one. After all, the idea is so awesome that it would be better to wait until you can make it perfect, right? Here's what I always say: The only difference between a game designer, and someone who wants to be a game designer, is designing games.

    It can be daunting to start, but that's the genius of the One-Hour Game Jam: it only takes an hour! Even if it doesn't work out, you'll have fun and learn valuable lessons just by participating. And if it does work out, you have a prototype that you can polish for as long as you want. If you have time to binge-watch Netflix, you have time to pursue your dream of making games.

 

Getting Into It

    So how does this actually work? How are you supposed to make a functioning, playable game in only 60 minutes? Where do you start?

    Everyone's method is different, but generally, there are two ways to approach a new design: top down ("I want to make a game about space") or bottom up ("I want to make a game about worker placement"). It's okay to spend the first few minutes brainstorming ideas.

    Once you know what you want the game to be, you need two things: a win-condition and a core mechanic. Maybe you need to score the most points by rolling dice, or maybe you want to deal damage to your opponent by playing cards. It doesn't have to be super fleshed out at this point, as long as you can at least try to play it. 

    Don't tell anyone I told you this, but... don't be afraid to steal things from other games. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Hell, most game genres start with one novel design an a handful of clones before people start iterating. If something works, and it would work well in your design, don't be afraid to throw it in there and try it out.

    The other thing to keep in mind is simplicity. You're not going to hammer out a perfect simulation of New York city electrical grids in an hour. Keep your scope small and don't include too many mechanics. You can always add more content later, but if your game is built around a dozen variables from the start, it will be much harder to untangle.

Quantum Reflections

    To show you how it all fits together, I would like to introduce my own One-Hour Game Jam project. When my daughter was born, my mom-- an avid gamer and all-around badass-- visited to help us get settled. I convinced her to sit down and make a game with me, and together we created Quantum Reflections! (If you're looking for another reason to try it, by the way, it's a great way to pass an afternoon with someone.)

    We started with brainstorming-- each of us wrote down a few thoughts, and we combined as many of them as we could into the game. A few of the things we came up with were "Dr. Manhattan," "parallel universe," and "cosmic scale." We ended up settling on a game about parallel universes being "shattered" (a la Hello from the Magic Tavern), with the players controlling a god-like cosmic entity trying to mend the fractures.

    The thing that makes it unique is that each half of the board is a reflection of the other. The players cooperate by controlling a single entity moving between two mirror dimensions. Wherever one player ends their turn, the other player starts in the same spot on the other board.

    To continue the theme of reflection, there are four different-colored resources, and each space on the board is associated with one of those colors. The colors are also opposite on each side of the board. To reinforce this flavor, each planet has an identity that is presented in opposites-- for example, a planet might be an ice world on one side and a volcano world on the other.

    The win condition is "stabilizing" the rifts, which a player can do by spending resources at certain locations. To provide an obstacle, there are "fractures" that spread across the board. Players can't move through the fractures, but they can mend them by spending time and resources. 

    Now comes the part where we borrow from other games. I'm a big fan of Matt Leacock's work, particularly Pandemic, so we adopted the core mechanics of that game: you have four actions a turn; you can move, "mend" (like treating disease in Pandemic, this removes fracture pieces from the board), stabilize rifts (analogous to curing diseases), and share resources. The fractures spread two pieces per turn, with their placement determined by dice, and the players lose if they run out of fracture pieces. The fractures spread faster when they collide, calling back to Outbreaks in Pandemic.

 

    What's interesting about this game is that it forces you to think on two boards at once. While the basic layout is the same both ways, the fractures tend to spread differently on each side thanks to the dice. As a result, you might move differently to put the other player somewhere they wouldn't have been able to reach because of the rift.

    The most important part of the process is playtesting. We tried it out a few turns at a time, figured out the rules as we went along to fill in the gaps, and at the end of the day, we had a game. Not only that, we had a blast making it. Once FUR is done, Quantum Reflections is one of two games that I want to build on this blog (you can find the other one here).

Game, Set, Jam

    That's all for this week. If you've read this far, grab a friend and give the OHGJ a try! We'd love to hear about the games you make, or any game that you've made in a game jam before. You can let us know in the comments below or over on Reddit here!

    This Friday we'll be discussing the future of Festival of Urbestia and digging into feedback; next Wednesday, we're back with fresh custom designs featuring the custom Tragedy mechanic. Until then, you can check out our breakdown of Magic's latest set, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, along with the statistical analysis here. 

 

See you soon!