Train Jam 2016

Last week, I attended TrainJam, a rapid game development event where a bunch of talented people board a train from Chicago to California and make games before arriving.

The Schedule

Thursday morning: Get up and head to TrainJam. Meet the organizers and have early lunch with the other attendees. I sat at a table with nobody I knew and tried to learn a bit about everyone.
We learned about the process of TrainJam and the theme: ‘Maximum Capacity’. Everyone spent 20-30 minutes brainstorming ideas. Then came a frantic shouting pitching where you had 10-15 seconds to sell your idea if you had a good one.
Then we boarded. RIT was very generous in providing sleeper cars to the five RIT graduate students attending
I ended up with a team of two others – one student from UWisconsin & one programmer. We went to work.
Saturday at 3:20 PM: (Early) Arrival
Saturday at 4:00 PM: Intended arrival – minor celebration at the Amtrak Station.

Our Team

GIF

Our team was made up of three individuals.

Myself (@JPalmerGD): Programmer and Architect. I laid out the core structure for the project, wrote the simple AI for the pods, and setup scene transition.

Kalan Tix (@Kemblik): Artist and modeller. She modeled our escape pods, asteroids, debris. She illustrated our UI layouts, color palettes and logo.

Matthew Yaeger (@AmazingThew): Programmer and Unity novice. He wrote the pod control code and grappling hook. He tuned the gameplay feel and pacing.

Our Game – Apodcalypse

Apodcalypse is a multiplayer physics survival game. Each player has a single escape pod they are trying to wade to the top of the screen through a mess of debris, AI pods and other players.

The game is available on Itch.IO and we’re pretty happy with what we got done.

Difficulties of working

• The train rattled – hard to model, draw and use a mouse.
• Hardly any internet – no reference docs. You know it or you don’t.
• Limited table space – likely no table.
• Difficult to sleep – I am thankful RIT provided a sleeper car. My teammates improvised.
• Hygiene challenges – I did get a shower during the ride. The cars did start to smell a bit.
• Limited food – Snacks started to run low towards the end. I came prepared.

The Payoff

• I met somewhere around 50-60 people out of the 200.
• I rescued a couple people from terrible situations (with backup installers & other stuff).
• I bumped into people from Vlambeer (Nuclear Throne/Ridiculous Fishing/Luftrausers), Camp Santo (Firewatch), MediaMolecule (Little Big Planet), Organ Trail, Intel, Epic, Unity, Xbox team, Indie artists, freelancers, Indie developers and more.
• I now have a game to show at the EXPO floor which will lead me to meet more developers!

Lessons

1. Take every chance to meet new people. Another grad chose to share his room with a random – ended up with the CEO of the Firewatch team.
2. Names are important. Learning people’s names tells them you feel they’re important and they remember you. I greatly value learning names.
3. Twitter. Plenty of devs use twitter. I now have a solid focus to meet and connect with other developers.
4. Be prepared. I bailed out several people with my external hard drive. I had various installers, documentation and backup assets.
5. Scope it down. We targeted a small game and got it together in time.
6. Unity – Most devs were using Unity. Unreal and Lumberyard are just too difficult or unknown for this sort of jam setting (especially without internet documentation/stack overflow)

Regrets

Matthew was very new to Unity. I definitely think it made our end goals a bit harder. It was a great experience to be senior to someone else in terms of knowledge. Steering him towards techniques without explicitly sitting and teaching him step by step.

Not working with industry established individuals would’ve provided better networking and likely taught me some new tricks. I still enjoyed myself tremendously and learned much from the process.

I spent 3 hours solving a particularly nasty bug. This was a result of sleepiness, poor working conditions and hunger. This bug ended up stumping 3 other programmers before I managed to crack it. I don’t feel too bad about this.

In Closing

Train Jam was a fantastic experience I hope to repeat.

Challenging, engaging, and beautiful.