Post-mortem on a fabulous failure

I’d like to talk a bit about the failure I experienced recently. Unlike most failed endeavors, this one was one of those rare “good” failures.

Sometimes failure leaves you feeling empty and like you completely suck at whatever it is you attempted. That feeling is familiar to a lot of people, but it’s not really useful in moving forward. Other times you can look at your failure objectively and learn from it in a real way. I’m lucky in that, despite not even remotely finishing any part of it, my most recent project ended this way.

I had set out very excited to participate in ILU JAM, a game jam focused on making some kind of game where romance was the main theme. I’ve played a bunch of RPGs that have romance aspects and already had a couple tools in my pocket that made me think I could do this: 1) I’m a writer. I know my way around a story. And 2) I already had a solid idea to work from.

I settled on Twine as my game engine, feeling that I would have the best chance by leaning on my writing skills, and when June 1st hit, I started building a game.

I failed. Utterly.

As much as I love games, love RPGs, and love good stories, I had gone down completely the wrong path for this jam. (A game jam, btw, is a community activity where there is a theme and a set amount of time in which you have to build a playable, if not complete, game) I did, however, manage to come away with a few lessons to go along with my dose of disappointment.

First Lesson: Choose the right tools for the job

The first week or so, I found that my skills with Twine were woefully lacking for what I wanted to do with it. While building a basic text-based game is incredibly easy in Twine, doing anything more complex than linking to the next story segment is challenging. There are some things I really needed (inventory, health meters, and combat in particular) that are possible in Twine, but not really practical. In short, I really chose the wrong game engine for what I was trying to do.

Second Lesson: Know your scope

In addition to choosing the wrong tool for the job, I also chose the wrong project. The game I have in my head (which will still be made at some point) is too ambitious for a one month jam. I had thought I had trimmed it down to some kind of prototype version, but even that was far too expansive for the amount of time and effort I had available. I was trying to do too much in too little time.

Third Lesson: Know your limits

I did not anticipate having my workload at my day job increase in June. That change, along with keeping up with my other responsibilities, left me either too taxed to work on the game, or simply without the time to even think about it at all. I should have factored in this kind of possibility at the planning stage. Of course, I didn’t really have much of a planning stage after all.

Final Lesson: Have a plan, even though you know it will change

I jumped in head first into this jam in an attempt to be spontaneous. I had never built a game before but have been wanting to for a while now. This seemed like the perfect opportunity, since I already had a good idea and some solid writing skills. But I didn’t plan it out at all. I had no idea how to use Twine properly, didn’t have a clue who the characters where I was writing about, and had no idea how long all this was actually going to take.

In the end, I learned a ton about what not to do. Time was a huge factor and I wasted plenty of it just reading documentation in a hopeless effort to make the game I saw in my head, or even a small part of it. Bad decisions were made on my part and I can see them clearly now. Am I disappointed? Of course I am. However, I’m grateful for the lessons I learned in participating. Once I’ve licked my wounds and learned a bit more about how to build a game, I look forward to trying out a game jam again in the future.

For now, it’s back to the drawing board, with a few new circuits connected in my brain to show for it.