25 New Games From The Mystery Game Jam!
And lessons I learned from my own experience
Happy Mystery May!
Yes, you read that right — Mystery May! April has already come and gone (too quickly) and as the old saying goes, April game jams bring May mysteries! Or something like that, anyway.
That’s right, with the end of April comes the end of our first official Mystery Game Jam. Over 150 people signed up to attempt to make their own mystery game in 30 days. The result was 25 new mystery games — at least one game you can play every day for the rest of the month of May!
Seriously, those are some big numbers! I wasn’t even sure if we’d get 25 people, but here we ended up with 25 games! And for many of these people, it is the first game they’ve ever made. Congratulations to everyone on your hard work and dedication!
I will spend some time this week playing through each game, and hopefully I’ll come up with a list of favorites to share with you all here.
If you’d like to play the games yourself, you can find them all here.
Also, for those of you who participated, I will be setting up a feedback survey to let me know how your experience went and what we can do to improve the event next year.
What if you couldn’t submit a game in time?
Now with all that said, I’d like to offer some words of advice to anyone who wasn’t able to submit a game within the time limit.
First of all, please do not feel too badly about it. Games are hard to make, and mystery games specifically are really hard to make. Even with a 30 day time limit, making a mystery game is not an easy task. It can be done, but it is not easy.
In fact — I nearly forgot to mention this above — but many of those 25 games are prototypes, demos, or just very short games. But that’s fine, because game jams are all about forcing you to create a minimum viable product in a short amount of time.
What’s important is that you learned something valuable from the experience. Maybe you learned a new engine or tool. Maybe you fleshed out some ideas that were stuck in your head for a long time. Maybe you learned a lot about your strengths and weaknesses. Or maybe you simply learned what not to do next year.
Remember, game jams are supposed to be fun. If it’s causing you more stress than it’s helping you, then you need to change your mindset. The world won’t end if you miss the deadline. So as long as you know you tried your best, that’s all that really matters. And you can always give it another shot next time around.
My experience and lessons learned
Initially, I didn’t plan on creating my own jam entry. I knew I would be too busy with running the event and working on higher priority projects to dedicate much time to it. But I decided to give it a shot regardless with an idea I had been thinking about lately.
Quite a number of things outside of my control got in my way, so I guess it just wasn’t meant to happen this year. Maybe that was the case for you as well.
On the bright side, I do think I learned what not to do, and now I have a much better strategy for next year. Here is what I learned:
Make a plan, and stick to it. Since I never planned on making a game this month, trying to make one resulted in pivot after pivot to ideas that just didn’t work out. Planning out my idea before the jam started would have prevented this issue.
Give yourself plenty of time. I didn’t start on my ideas until halfway through the month, and I tried pivoting to a totally new idea with just 5 days remaining. I might’ve been able to get something done if I’d used the whole 30 days. But trying to do too much on such short notice will just stress you out.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. When your time is limited, you can’t afford to spend it building features that already exist in other engines. This is especially true for smaller teams or solo developers. Use an existing engine to build your prototype, then pivot after the jam to a custom solution.
Stick to your strengths. Again, when you have limited time and resources, you can’t afford to pivot into a totally new genre. You will have no idea where to start and will spend most of your time getting up to speed with the basics. Make a game similar to what you already know, but with a small twist.
Create with passion. If you don’t have passion for what you’re working on, it will show in the quality of the final product. Even worse, you won’t have the motivation to finish it. Games are a form of art, so aim to make your project a reflection of who you are and what you are passionate about.
I’d like to come back to the ideas I worked on for this jam in the future, but right now I have much more pressing issues to tackle.
My plans for May are the usual suspects: adding new features to the website, creating content for mystery gamers, and providing more tools and resources for mystery game developers. I have everything planned out, but it all just takes time.
I am still very much excited for the future, so I appreciate your patience. It’s truly inspiring to see so many people excited about what we are building!
Thanks for reading!
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