TriJam 327

This past weekend I did TriJam, which is a fairly well-attended online game jam.  This jam runs every week and participants can only be considered for top spots if their game was completed within 3 hours (per team member).

Here's a time lapse of all three hours

What I like about this jam is the constraints & flexibility.  3 hours is a crazy constraint (certainly too crazy to learn anything new or venture too far down an untravelled path, unfortunately).  Giving us 3 days actually makes it viable for me - I can alot my typical friday AM work session to the first hour, and then scrounge a couple of hours out of the weekend.

The problem, as touched on previously, is that the muscle this stresses is time management & scoping.  Sure - I need to work on that muscle - but once the jam starts its really just about racing through the checklist.  I took it on as a break, but it was actually more stressful than my typical activity during my hobby dev hours (the roguelike).

I was surprised to feel the stress and tension fairly strongly throughout the weekend as I sped through my tasklist.  It was comparable to TOJam 2024, a 3-day in-person jam I did with my son.  I really hate not having something interesting to play and it becomes all-consuming.  I missed TOJam this year, but I wonder if I'll jam much more at all.  I suspect I benefit more from longer-form experimentation & development.

Anyways, the game is fine, but obviously as a 3 hour solo jam the value is really the journey and not the destination.  Your average consumer is going to try it for 5 minutes and move on - in fact, pretty much everyone will.  The personal cost of the extra effort over a weekend is absolutely not worth the outcome.