What I learned from my first game jam

So, https://itch.io/jam/ndab-jam was my first game jam.

I've been in love with games, like most of us here on itch, since I was a kid. I've been always fascinated by games, yeah, just like most of us here.

Fiddling with some projects and not finishing them was a little bit frustrating. I really wanted to make that "big" game that I always dreamed of doing since I was a kid, but the reality is that to develop the "dream" game is not as easy as it sound. It would be a joyful experience if you set the time, budget, skills and efforts to accomplish it, but again, the reality is that as an indie game developer, it requires an enormous effort and determination to do these things. So instead of doing nothing, we create these small and fun games because it provide us with these joyful  and amazing "I've achieved something" moments!

So yeah, I heard about game jams for years but was always worried to participate in one. Simply because I was afraid that my game won't be good enough to compete with other awesome games out there. But just a couple of days ago, I decided to participate in the Quarantine Game Jam. No thinking too much, no "what if?" questions, nothing. Just create a game, finish it, then submit it and enjoy the experiment.

And it was indeed an amazing experiment! Since it was my first game jam I had no idea what the heck am I doing. But I just did it. I took my pen, started to scrape some quick ideas to match the theme, which is "Pack انضب". 

Got the idea, a small simulation game inspired by the Sims in a very small scope. The player needs to pack all of his stuff at home and enjoy spending time reading books, playing xbox, watching NetFlix, playing sports or eating pizza, etc. 

I started to draw a small 2d character quickly on my notebook. I then drew some objects and scanned them to my computer and modified them a little bit in Photoshop and then started a new Unity project and called it "Yats Emoh", pretty creative huh ^^!

So yeah, more than 12 hours of continuous work. I worked only in the second day of the game jam as I couldn't work on the first day. Took me some serious effort to finish all the programming, art and music from scratch. But guess what? Yep, the game ended up incomplete. It needed more time to get it done the way I wanted it to be.

Adding objects and interacting with them required some animations. Adding a new level required new art and new objects. So I couldn't do that as I didn't "scope" the project correctly. So then I asked myself, should I submit it? It's not finished, it's not that good game, it's boring, it's .. etc.

I submitted it. And I feel SO HAPPY I did so. It didn't get ratings and it's alright because it wasn't finished. But the most important thing here, is that I actually submitted it. 

It's about the learning experience. It's about taking pride of what you've done even if it was a small thing. If you're reading this and wonder if you should submit your game or not because you fear that your game isn't good enough, I say just do it, don't think about it too much, you'll get better in every new game you create!

So yeah, it was a fun experience and I saw some really awesome games and creative people!

Looking forward for the next game jam, thanks for reading this ^_^