Jumping Into The Game Jam Sphere with Psyche Game Jam 2024
ENGLISH | SVENSKA | 日本語
What is your biggest motivator to get work done? Deadlines? Accountability? Community? In game development, there’s special events that utilize all three of these: game jams. For budding game devs, these occasions are a great opportunity to create a game within a set time limit and see what can be achieved. Just about anyone can host a game jam, so in 2024, from April 1st to May 31st, Harmony Frontiers created one of its own: Psyche Game Jam 2024.
The idea was pitched in early June of 2023. We had been looking for ways to better connect with the communities we wished to contribute to. Being both a digital artist and game developer myself, I had already spent time participating in others’ jam-focused visual novel projects and learning from other developers in the community. In the process, I had picked up on the efforts put into hosting a game jam and believed it was a viable option for Harmony Frontiers to pursue. An unranked jam seemed low-maintenance enough to not fully divert the attention away from the projects we already had under development. It was also an opportunity to do something for Mental Health Awareness Month, a period we valued the importance of, but never had much to show for.
It was decided that the jam would last from the beginning of April to the end of May, a time range of two months, to give participants flexibility with their time management within the typical jam crunch. We wanted this to be a relaxed event with the purpose of promoting the creation of story-based games with mental health themes. Although we were open to all genres of games, we took inspiration from notable visual novel jams, such as Otome Jam and Trans Representation Jam, so we thought two months was a reasonable time period. Having said that, we’d later come to learn that this is considered long outside of the visual novel community!
With all this in mind and everyone agreeing to the commitment, we put together a schedule for everything we expected to need before launch, giving ourselves some wiggle room in case any deadlines had to be extended. First on the list was setting up an Itch.io account for Harmony Frontiers. This was straightforward and was more about laying down the foundation of our profile, so that a blank account wouldn’t be attached to the jam. Second was designing a logo we could reuse yearly. We settled on a name, concept, and color palette, then reached out to YuukiPudding, an artist we’d found through Lemmasoft. Yuuki was a joy to work with and bore with us as we went back and forth ironing out the final design. In the meantime, we knew we needed to get a headstart on the key art that’d be used to promote the jam. We had picked NIKOLAY as Psyche Game Jam’s mascot. Since he’s a Computer Science major in our webcomic Ambivalence, we thought it was fitting for the event. We contacted our usual outfit designer, Rosariy, to put together a design that’d match the logo. The end result perfectly suited the character and the vibes we wanted to get across. Now that the logo and mascot were at the ready, we had everything we needed for the event’s key art. This time, we turned to DevTalk to find an artist. After putting up a recruitment post, various individuals were quick to express their interest in the role. It was difficult to narrow down, but we ultimately went with Crowlee for their unique art style.
While the DevTalk Discord server is an amazing resource for game developers delving into visual novels, we aimed to have our own public Discord server open before the announcement of our jam, in order for participants to have a space specifically for the Psyche Game Jam. We added an entire category of channels to the server for this, which consisted of places for entry links, team recruitment, casual game dev chatting, idea bouncing, sharing WIPs, asking for support, and even a voice channel for developers who liked working together on call. Our server went public in January, with the Psyche Game Jam section being accessible through an opt-in role we’d soon allow users to choose. Meanwhile, we finished up the jam page over on Itch.io. We figured the information provided could be split into four categories: an introduction, the rules, community resources, and credits. The introduction explained the theme of the jam, what type of jam it was, its time period, and its purpose. For the rules, we cross-referenced other story-focused game jams to determine the most important aspects to address. This ranged from what kind of content could be included in submissions, any specific restrictions on the development process, what types of submissions were allowed, where you could source your assets, the host’s right to remove entries that violate guidelines, whether the host plans to do anything with the final submissions, and who retains the rights to submitted work. We decided to make our community section about redirecting interested readers to places we trusted to provide them support in their development process. These were our own Discord server, the Community tab on our jam page, the DevTalk Discord server, and the Lemmasoft forums. The last two were admittedly more catered towards visual novels, but as this was a jam for story-based games, we knew a good portion of their resources would still apply.
The promotional artwork for Psyche Game Jam 2024. The logo was designed by YuukiPudding and the illustration was drawn by Crowlee.
Announcing the jam across our social media in early February wasn’t a one-and-done affair. It was up to us to seek out people who would consider joining, because how can anyone participate in the jam if they don’t know it exists? As Psyche Game Jam 2024 drew near, we made a couple more posts on social media as we brought up the jam, when relevant, in game dev servers. By the time the jam started, we had about 42 participants listed on our page. While exciting in the moment, we’d already heard that the number of participants signing up wouldn’t reflect the number of submissions we’d get at all. Think of it like this: the button for registering as a participant may say “join,” but it’s really a measure of how many people are interested in the event. Most will click to signify that the jam is on their radar, but there’s plenty of things life can throw at them that’ll prevent them from actually participating. Furthermore, those that do commit to the jam may be unable to finish in time. This is a frequent, expected occurrence with various causes. It could be inadequate time management, too large of a scope, team members dropping out at the last minute - the possibilities are endless! This is part of the reason why game jams will often encourage you to submit what you did get done, whether that be as a demo or as an early, incomplete version. The latter is typically recommended during competitive jams with strict time limits. Otherwise, users may opt to push off the release and not submit anything at all.
We went in with the mindset that we’d be content getting two or three submissions. Anything more than that would be amazing, and if we received just one, we could live with it. We were very apprehensive about nothing being submitted at all, but that was the worst case scenario. If it happened, we’d deal with it in one way or another. The end results weren’t up to us anyway. They depended on our participants! Therefore, we did our best to provide support when needed in both the jam’s Community tab and our own public Discord server.
A screenshot of regen=Q’s Psyche Game Jam 2024 submission, this is a platform about blue. In the game, players take the role of a little robot that climbs to attain its next battery refill.
By the time Psyche Game Jam 2024 was over, one game had been entered: this is a platform about blue, a demo produced by regen=Q. Not only does it provide challenging gameplay, but as you progress through the levels, you’re slipped tidbits of commentary on the experience of living with Autism Spectrum Disorder and the stigma that surrounds it. Playing this myself, getting the chance to read through more of the narrative pushed me to keep powering through the difficult areas of the map. If you’re a fan of platformers and wish to learn more about autism, I’d highly recommend you give this title a try!
Now that the jam has reached its end, we may try our hand at implementing changes in our process to improve on future Psyche Game Jam events. To start, we had an issue that went completely unnoticed until it was too late: our jam hadn’t been indexed on Itch.io’s game jams page until less than a month before the event. This page is where most of your potential participants will find you. We assumed what we experienced was normal at the time and were simply happy to see a large uptick in participants once it did appear. However, if it has been a few weeks since a jam page was published and other jams during the same time period are already visible on the calendar, it’s best to contact Itch.io’s support team to see why the page has yet to be reviewed.
Another problem we quickly ran into was a lack of promotional images to frequently update our social media. We didn’t want to constantly repost the same visuals every time, but we also had nothing else to work with. This could potentially be worked around on platforms that allow text-only posts, but since we didn’t want to leave our Instagram audience out of the loop, we tried to scrape up whatever visuals we could. Along similar lines, we’d like to amp up our marketing by seeking out more avenues where we can inform game developers about the event.
Inevitably, Psyche Game Jam 2024 coincided with many other story-focused jams. Many interested parties expressed dismay over its timing. Even though we were open to games being submitted to both our event and concurrent ones, it still felt as if we were hopelessly competing. To combat this, we’ll aim to share the future years’ jam pages further in advance, so that potential participants have more time to work the event into their schedules. It may also help to make our standpoint clear by revising our guidelines. There’s no problem with encouraging entries being submitted to multiple jams, so long as they follow all of the jams’ rules!
Finally, a rather simple change would be to initiate more check-ins with entrants during the jam period. This can be as easy as setting a weekly reminder in the correlated Discord server or sending out emails through the game jam’s settings on Itch.io. One principle we keep in mind is to make sure there’s value in, and a purpose to, what’s being sent. It’s best to implement a self-imposed limit to how often messages go out as well. After all, no one likes being spammed with notifications!
With everything that happened during this experience, was hosting a game jam worth it? Absolutely! Technically speaking, we accomplished everything we set out to do. Maybe not to the degree we would have liked, but in the end, we successfully connected with others in the game development community, influenced the production of mental health-themed games, and generally made a positive impact! Even those who didn’t finish on time shared with us that the event inspired them to make progress on their games. It was incredibly heartwarming to hear! They may not have made it to the end, but we’re proud of their efforts all the same.
Written by Mx. RuK
Edited by Hanako and Stardust DaydreamerSpecial thanks to VirtualMini!