The Mini Game Jam

A promotional flier for the Mini Game Jam, created by Nicholas Way.

One of the issues that's long challenged the officers of WolverineSoft, the game development club at the University of Michigan, was how to address the knowledge gap faced by students interested in participating with no prior game development experience. In the past, as late as 2019, WolverineSoft would host weekly workshops in addition to weekly club meetings, an offering which was axed before I joined the club's officers, for good reason. The workload required by members of the officer corps to design and run these workshops each week was quite large, and within a few weeks, attendance would drop sharply as WolverineSoft members would fall behind the sequence of workshops. Indeed, cutting the workshops proved to be beneficial to the attendance of the club's main weekly meetings. However, the issue still remained: what else could be done to help kick-start new member's game development journey? Certainly we could take a hands-off approach, providing resources and encouragement for new members to learn on their own. But we, the WolverineSoft officers of 2022, had a better idea, and it turned out to be our most successful event of the year.

Insofar as practical game development experience is concerned, WolverineSoft offers two avenues: for those interested in pursuing game development professionally, the WolverineSoft Studio offers students a chance to participate in a semester-long game development project, giving members a nice portfolio piece and experience working in a large studio team. Naturally, this is a major commitment for the semester, and since the studio can only support so many students in each department, there is an application process, and experience is generally required.

For students interested in a more casual development experience, WolverineSoft hosts weekend-long game jams twice a semester. No experience is required to attend, and students are welcome to work alone, bring their own teams, or meet other interested developers and form teams there. WolverineSoft encourages students without game development experience interested in joining the studio to participate in a game jam or two. The game jams were undoubtably my favorite offering of the club, as they were a lot of fun and created a space and time to focus on creative work and connect with fellow game developers. Unfortunately, for those with little to no game development experience, a first game jam tends to be rather intimidating.

To bridge the gap from no experience to a first game jam, we created an event we called the Mini Game Jam. The idea was this: at the beginning of the fall semester, shortly before the occurrence of the first game jam, we would host an event that took place from 10 AM to 8 PM on a Saturday. The event sought to accomplish two goals: to give new members the opportunity to become comfortable with game jamming, and to provide workshops throughout the day for complete beginners to get their feet wet with game development.

Some time during the previous semester, towards the same latter goal, we had introduced some new workshops which took place as the regular weekly club meets. These workshops, aptly titled Unity 101 and Unity 102, provided beginners a chance to work through a project alongside the workshop leader, building what could be their first Unity project from the ground up. These workshops were intended to be independent, so one could jump into the second without having attended the first (though their names imply otherwise) by using the provided project code. Additionally, the entire workshop was documented in a tutorial one could work through at their own pace. As this took place many months before, we decided that the Mini Game Jam should first consist of these workshops so beginners could get off the ground with the Unity game engine. These workshops ran for an hour each. After the workshops, we provided a brief run down of the free assets available use in their games, as well as an overview of the common licenses used by them. At 12:30, we broke for lunch. (We had actually catered both lunch and dinner that day on account of the length of the event.)

We had two more workshops before we began the "open" portion of the day, so attendees would be better prepared to work collaboratively. The first discussed game design and scoping, and the second covered version control and GitHub (it was originally intended to be a Unity Collab workshop, but we found out that tool was deprecated). Finally, we had what we called the Open Work time, which ran from about 3 PM until 7 PM. This time was essentially a very short game jam, where teams had the opportunity to practice what we had gone over. We encouraged teams to focus on building one feature, perhaps on top of the Unity workshop project, as that was what the time best allowed.

Of course, there's a lot more that goes into game development than just programming, and we did not want to neglect that! So, during that four hour period, we held two optional workshops in the room next door, for an hour each. These workshops covered pixel art and animation, sound effect creation and generation, music production, and adding audio to a Unity game.

Throughout the Open Work period, the WolverineSoft officers would occasionally stop by each team and check in, address any questions, and provide any support needed. At 7 PM, during the last hour of the night, we had our closing ceremony and a showcase, where teams could share what they managed to build. Since it was such a short time to work, there was no pressure to have done well or compete with the other teams. Nevertheless, many of the teams managed to surprise us with their accomplishments.

As a combination of the facts that this event took place during the beginning of the semester, before students' course workloads really took hold, and that this event was marketed towards beginners, it was very well attended! Naturally, hindsight informed us of all the hiccups that could have been avoided with better planning for the workshops (instructing attendees to install Unity on their laptops before the workshop was a big one, since the building's Wi-Fi was not pleased with dozens of people simultaneously downloading gigabytes). Even with the burden of presenting these workshops divided as evenly as possible amongst the officer corps, running the Mini Game Jam turned out to be quite exhausting to run, far more than a typical game jam despite only taking place during one day. However, it was in equal part rewarding. Indeed, it was rewarding to see the turnover of familiar faces to the subsequent game jam, students who were entirely new to game development now equipped and comfortable to tackle the challenge of building an entire game in just one weekend.