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Winning a game jam is one of the most rewarding experiences I have had as a game developer. You have to wear so many hats to be an indie game developer. You are a game designer, a coder, a writer, an artist (even if you’d rather not be), an animator, a sound designer, a composer, a UI designer, a marketer, etc. All of these titles are under the umbrella term indie game dev, and we don’t talk about it enough. And when we get any feedback that this tireless work is not in vain, it feels GOOD. When I did rank #2 overall in a game jam and win #1 for art in the jam, it made all of my efforts feel worth it. I am sharing my experience for how I won a game jam to share this success, and so you can do it too.
Step 1: Think Small To Win
First things first. If you want to win a game jam, you need to be calculated to increase your chances of winning. And one of the first things you can consider is the size of the game jam. And I say this from experience.
Big Takeaways from Small Game Jams
Choosing small game jams will be in your favor if you are looking to win a game jam (or rank). Small game jams are not attracting the most experienced game devs and teams and decrease the competition. This may come at a cost to how organized the jam might be, but small game jams are a dime a dozen. You can pick one that seems more organized.
In addition, these smaller game jams usually happen over a weekend. I would recommend a smaller time period (as small as your schedule allows), because even the most talented of developers can only do so much with limited time. Basically, the more limited you go with a game jam (from time periods or other constraints), the less of a gap there will be with your submission and others.
Now from a less tactical point of view, smaller game jams mean you can enter more and learn more. Finishing 4 smaller games in 4 weekends will teach you more than finishing one game in a month. And that is the entire point of game jams. They hold you accountable to learn more as a game dev and what you need in order to become one.
Not to mention, if you create more games with the same amount of time, you’re diversifying your portfolio of games. You can learn more than just skills, but also about your process, like what games you even enjoy making! The more games you make for jams also means higher chances of winning if you are integrating what you are learning in each following game jam.
I had to learn this the hard way…
My First Game Jam…
One of the first game jams I entered was the “1-Bit Jam #2” hosted by MYline Media on itch. This was too large of a game jam, as it had about 2,500 participants join. You might be thinking that sounds small compared to some game jams. Right now as I write this article, two featured game jams on itch have 15k+ participants actively. However, I needed to have thought smaller.
The number of actual submissions was large too: 299. Granted many of these submissions were likely joint efforts from participants (which I’ll get to in a moment). But let’s say each entry had a team of three behind it. That doesn’t account for more than two thirds of the participants! Nonetheless, about 300 submissions meant I had at least 300 people to compete with. And the first dozen of the submissions were done within two days of the 7 day long jam.
On itch, you are able to see the submissions as they come in, and they looked stunning, even with only two colors present. Before I had even started my submission, I was disheartened. Like most of the participants, I did not even end up finishing a game to enter.
While this jam wasn’t too long, for my first one, I should have gone even shorter, like a weekend. I wouldn’t have obsessed over how much farther ahead the other participants were. And the worst part is, I didn’t even feel like I learned enough in this game jam. Our brains need peace and curiosity, not doom and shame, in order to learn new skills. Everything I had accomplished in this jam did not integrate for my next one.
Step 2: You Can’t Win Game Jams Without Games…
You might know where I’m going with this based on what I’ve already shared…
My Game Jam History…
According to my itch page, I have entered 7 game jams. Of these 7 game jams I have only truly completed and submitted an entry to one… Yes, that means I won my first game jam entry. But it wasn’t luck that brought me there. It was learning about my process after each failed game jam.
How I Won by Learning More About Myself (And Additional Help)
The only way I won this game jam was by finishing a game. With each of my previous entries, I had gotten too stuck at coding. While I had programming classes in college, they did not emphasize efficiency with time coding. And to be honest, I am just a painfully slow coder. With my later entries, I had all the design, concept art, art assets, music, etc laid out, but I could not for the life of me finish coding simple game mechanics in time to submit these entries. So I accepted my failure here, and problem-solved.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, if you are a programmer, that this isn’t your problem. If you are reading this article, however, you have a bottleneck somewhere. Maybe it is the exact opposite problem. Perhaps making the game assets takes too long for you. Or thinking of UI design is difficult. My advice is find the bottleneck and remove it! Leave winning game jams out of it, you need to remove bottlenecks to finish games. If art is specifically your bottleneck, and you’re on a budget, my article Where To Find Free, 2D Pixel Game Assets For Your Indie Game is for you
Now coding is integral to game development, so I decided I would need help getting even an entry submitted to a game jam. Through an online rabbit hole, I found the subreddit INAT, which stands for I Need a Team Member. It is a game developer targeted subreddit where indie devs find one another and create joint projects. One of the most recent posts I stumbled upon was from Enzed. When I read his request for an artist (and art I would say is my edge in indie development) to work on a game, I knew we would be a match.
After introductions on discord and seeing if we aligned, we got to work on our game jam entry Wild Paws for Easter Jam 2024, hosted by Wreckz Studios.
I will say, I was lucky. Not all people who post on INAT work with someone as seemlessly as I worked with Enzed. In addition to being a programmer, he is a talented game designer. While he credited me for design for Wild Paws, he spearheaded how the game design would be implemented and made it fun. He is well studied in game design principles. Any idea I had, he would make it practical and add to the “funness’ to the game.
Learning How to Scope to Finish Game Jams
It’s obvious I loved working with Enzed, and am looking forward to future opportunities. But I share this experience to show that your bottleneck, with some creative problem solving, can become the best part of your experience. You just have to be willing to accept what you know about yourself.
Now this doesn’t mean you have to find a team member. This can also be scoping your project correctly. When Enzed and I brainstormed art, I had an entire vision for how many art assets I would make to finish our game jam entry. If the entire weekend went according to plan, I would barely finish creating what I set out to create. This is because based on my previous game jams, I only finished 50-75% of my scope.
To combat this, I created an elaborate scope with different foliage and complex animations, which I thought were possible. But since I knew myself better, I knew only 50% of this would get done. That led me to front loading the most important game assets I needed to create, just to make the game playable and readable. In my article Make Pixel Art Assets for Your Indie Game: The Best Resources, I stress how the only important aspect in game art is its readability.
Learning this part of my process has helped me immensely to finish personal projects, not limited to game development. Heck, even creating this blog! I front loaded the important aspects, knowing I would lose steam 75% into the planned scope. But accepting this and planning for it meant I was able to launch a usable blog. An imperfect project finished is better than a project never launched.
Learning about the patterns in your process will take some time, especially learning your bottlenecks. But it can become a strength. Now back to regular programming of how to win a game jam!
Step 3: Don’t underestimate the power of your game’s uniqueness!
Your game is unique, and you need to highlight this when you present your game! To win a game jam, your game will need to stand out for people to even click on your entry and vote in it.
I believe a large part of why we ranked overall #2 for Wild Paws in the Easter Game Jam and #1 for Art is because our game’s submission page. We made the thumbnail highlight that it was a cozy-styled, pixel art hunting game from the POV of an apex predator. The combination of cozy and hunting naturally elicited interest. While there were only 60 entries, it was highly unlikely to expect voters to click on each of the 60 games and rate them (even though I highly encourage this sportsmanship!).
Not only will playing up the uniqueness of your game make it more likely that voters will play your game, but you will naturally learn more if you are willing to push yourself more.
In one of my unfinished-game, game-jam attempts, I had learned animation fundamentals, specifically pixel art animation. I mention the video that helped me get comfortable animating pixel art in my article: Pixel Art YouTubers for Beginners to Subscribe to. When I worked with Enzed, I was able to hone these fundamentals in. These animations were a key point in making our game stand out. My effort showed: most of our submission’s comments note the animations I made. And this contributed to us winning #1 for art in the game jam.
Pushing your game to be unique (within your scope and with bottlenecks removed), will push your own limits in a way that will lead to you learning and making substantial progress in your game development skills. And this is the whole point of game jams!
In Conclusion
While this article has been about winning game jams, the learning lessons can be applied to the entirety of your game development journey. I do hope they also lead to you also ranking in some game jams!
