Why We Jam

Back in 2012, Principal Engineer Ryan Hipple had an idea - a vision he had been holding onto since he was a kid. It looked like this:

Back then he pitched it to me and shortly after that I played FTL and broke the bad news: someone else already made your game, and it’s amazing. Maybe one Jam Week we could give it a try, though.

Ryan, John Kolencheryl and I have jammed together five years in a row, aka every single Jam Week ever. Along the way we joined forces with Josh Hendryx, Rebecca Cordingley and Michal Ksiazkiewicz. To us, the week represents the only chance to work together again since our first years at Schell Games. Ryan pitched the game to our team, but it didn’t catch on.

Jamming Through the Ages

In 2012, we made a game called Jump the Shark. For Jam Week 2013, we worked on Monstrosity, an overly ambitious networked multiplayer fast-choice combat simulator monstrosity. The following year we worked on Get Off My Planet, a twitchy action game for the tablet, which approached the look and feel of a full game much more than any of our previous Jam Week projects.

Jam Week as a standalone idea sounds deceivingly simple - it’s attractive and sounds super cool. It might even generate successful IP for the company. What’s hard to convey (and predict) is how much better you get at jamming every year. Better at estimating, evolving, developing, scoping and executing your project.

In 2013, the first time Ryan pitched his siege tower idea to our small Jam Week group, the verdict was 1) out of scope! and 2) this sounds exactly like FTL. In 2015, he pitched it again and the verdict changed to 1) if we do same-screen multiplayer, we can make it work and 2) it sounds amazing, let’s do it.

What changed? In 2012, Jump the Shark showed that we had the ability to make something really fun in a week. Monstrosity, in 2013, helped us understand the challenges of making a multiplayer Jam Week game. Get Off My Planet, our 2014 game, gave us the confidence to aim for a product that looked finished and polished.

It was the same team, but this time we had the experience and know-how to identify the value in the idea and the path towards scoping the game correctly to fit Jam Week’s constraints.

5 years in the making

All of the above means that this project could have never happened before. We needed several consecutive Jam Weeks working together to accrue enough experience to scope and develop the project properly.

This longevity speaks to the sustainability of Jam Week as an idea. Jam Week is a long-term investment in prototyping expertise as well as a team morale boosting effort.

What did we make?

Something we’re immensely proud of.

The game called Siege Force 5 pivoted during our initial brainstorming from tablet turn-based resource management, to a real-time tablet tap-to-give-orders, before finally settling at real time PC RTS platformer. We came in on Monday ready to build that version and by Tuesday we had a playable.

We spent the rest of the week iterating and refining. We know our strengths and understand how to make the most of our five days, so by the end of the week the project had evolved into a 2v2 local multiplayer extravaganza. On Friday afternoon, coworkers were cheering and awwwing as their gnomes attempted to impale each other with pencil ballistas. The project was a success and we believe it can be much more. Perhaps you’ll get a glimpse of it in the near future!

It took 5 years to be able to make this game in one week. And it was worth it.