You might not think so, from looking over my itch page full of wonky games, but I've worked in the software industry for over 25 years, mainly in the realm of boring grown-up enterprise stuff. I've been quite fortunate in that crunch - those periods where a hard deadline is approaching fast and the team has to put in extra hours to try and meet it - is something I've experienced only a handful of times. It seems that the tide is turning against it, as study after study shows (shock!) that driving your best and brightest to exhaustion is ultimately self-defeating and destructive. Who'da thunk it? All the free pizza and back-slapping "well done's" in the world can't give you back the time that you've lost, nor undo the impact on your relationships from spending long long hours at the office.

So why do I enjoy game jams so much when they are effectively self-inflicted crunch that you don't even get paid for?

In 2018 some friends invited me to take part in the annual VR Austin Jam. Taking place over a single weekend in the event space at the AFS Cinema, we had just two days to produce a VR-based something. I remember it being a mentally exhausting weekend where we barely saw sunlight, but there was also a tremendous energy about the space, and it was as almost as much fun seeing the other teams' projects evolve over the course of the two days as it was building our own. Our game, Flatland VR is more of a proof-of-concept than a full game, given that it consists of a single level that can be completed quite quickly, but I'm proud of what we achieved and I still think that it's an interesting concept that could have been taken further.

The next day I was pretty fried and wished that I had taken the day off of work, but there was a real sense of esprit-de-corps among the jammers. We had come together and made something cool, sharpened our skills, learned important lessons about scope and genuinely had fun. A short sprint can be an invigorating thing, though not sustainable. The sense of enjoyment would have faded pretty rapidly had it not been constrained to just a couple of long days. There was some talk of continuing the project and fleshing it out into a full game, but it didn't come to much beyond some minor bug-fixes.

VR Austin Jam returned the following year, and the same group of friends got together to enter. This time I brought along an idea I'd had for a VR game that emulated the vector-based graphics of the likes of Battlezone and Atari Star Wars After an equally exhausting weekend, the result was VekWars. This one I felt a particular sense of ownership for, given that I'd brought the original idea to the table, and I felt that there was an obvious route to completion from the original jam version, so I resolved to keep working on it, and it's now available as a paid app on both PC and Meta Quest. I still don't consider it entirely "finished" and I'm a little disappointed that I haven't managed to get an update out in quite a while, but it's absolutely not abandoned. I'll write more about its development in due course.

The 2020 VR Austin Jam was a bit of a weird one. We were deep in the COVID-19 pandemic and public gatherings weren't happening, so it went (appropriately) virtual. Thanks to the missus for offering to take care of the kids, I ended up getting a hotel room and working from there distraction-free, though again with same team, coordinating over Discord. It was still a worthwhile experience and The Vrd Dimension is the best-looking and most technically accomplished jam game I've worked on, but I'm maybe a little less fond of it due to the circumstances of its creation. It did, at least, provide some positive social interaction - albeit virtual - during an isolating and anxiety-ridden time.

I also took part in the annual GBJam a couple of times. This is an online, seven-day event to produce a game in a "Gameboy style". The requirements aren't hard-and-fast, and there's no need to make a game that actually runs on a Gameboy, but it should at least give the impression of one that could have appeared on the platform. Jocelyn Undergoes Many Perils and Super Laser Arena 9,000,000,000 came out of that one, and were enjoyable to create in a different way. They were both solo projects, so there was no social aspect, but that did mean that I had total creative control (for better or worse). The seven-day deadline meant that I was working on them around my work and family commitments, so they were less intense than an in-person weekend, but also provided some real motivation and focus. I'm proud that both of those games feel "complete" in a way, rather than just demos of larger games that never were. (Though I do have an expanded, colourized version of Jocelyn that's been 85% finished for bloody ages now.)

I'm always suspicious of mental health self-diagnoses but I'm going to hypocritically suggest that I might have some variety of ADHD. My folder full of unfinished game projects is testament to periods of intense focus that then fizzled out, resulting in my focus wandering off in search of some other source of dopamine. Opening that folder often leaves me depressed and frustrated with myself and my inability to see projects through to completion. GameJams provide the pressure to maintain focus while still operating across a short-enough timespan that I'm usually able to get to the end before the novelty wears off. I get the rare joy of actually completing something without the months- or years-long slog of a larger videogame project.

Sadly Austin VR Jam is no more, the 2020 virtual edition having been the last one. I still see that same group of friends from time to time, but recently we were talking about how much we missed VR Austin Jam and that we should all do another, non-VR related one some time. One of our number offered to host at his house so we could tackle Ludum Dare 54, and we convened there over the weekend of September 30th/October 1st 2023 to make what became People! Panic!!!.

The theme of LD54 was "Limited Space", and our host Paul came up with a scenario that we could all identify with - feeling anxiety when in a busy, crowded space. In its initial conception the player would find themselves in a series of crowded environments - a concert, a busy shopping mall, a sporting event - and have to make it to the exit before their anxiety got the better of them. There would be a feeling of being crushed from both sides by an ever-encroaching mass of bodies, and a nightmare-like atmosphere whereby escaping one environment would immediately segue into the next.

I initially imagined the throngs of people who would flood into the room as having a pre-defined "shape". Although each individual would be subject to their own physics, perhaps there would be a form to the crowd in which they walked. A form that could be messed up by the player running into them, yes, but also one that could provide a puzzle element. Like spotting where two jigsaw pieces would collide and finding the optimal path through them.

That idea might have worked but would have required a more carefully curated approach to our level design and therefore more time, so we decided to implement a more simplistic spawning behaviour whereby people would flood into the room via doors and wander around somewhat randomly. A simple mechanic that we managed to get working pretty quickly. I knocked up a big square room with some doors using tiles from another old, unfinished project, we made some ugly blobs for the player and "enemies", and by the end of the first day we had the basic gameplay loop down. Enter the room, get to the other side, avoid the people flooding in from either side. Each time you collided with one you would be knocked back a little and your "anxiety meter" would increase, resulting in a "panic attack" and game-over.

First day progress.

The second day wasn't quite as productive as the first. We added a "sprint" function, improved the ui, and replaced my tiles and the people blobs with some nicer, more colourful sprites. We didn't get around to implementing rooms that looked like real-world environments, so instead made a bunch of abstract levels with obstacles in the middle and people "spawners" in different locations. The concept still works though, and I laughed like a drain the first time I saw the Doomguy-style "panic level" emoji face in the corner. Our regular sound person wasn't available this weekend but his last-minute stand-in did an admirable job in creating crowd ambiance that becomes more distorted and chaotic as your sanity degrades.

For a quick five-minutes of amusement it's kinda fun, though play for any longer than that and its shortcomings become apparent. Really the "people" that you run into are more like particles that move at a set rate, bash off of each other (and you), and run head-first into walls. There was some attempt to shape their behaviour. The spawner doors have a range of configurable speeds that they can apply to the new humans that they birth, and there are invisible zones in some levels that are "attractive" to a random smattering of people and cause them to congregate there as though they were a point of interest. (Those might have worked to sell the "real-world environments" theme if we had gotten there.) Conversely, there are certain zones that they are supposed to try to avoid, such as around the exit door, though it's clear that those weren't entirely successful as they'll often get stuck there, making it difficult to escape the level. We didn't want to have a hard "force field" that they'd bounce off of. Instead, when they enter one of those zones, they will pick a location elsewhere on the level to head towards, but some of the time they'll get stuck on the scenery or ricochet off of each other and never make it out of the doorway.

A level from the final game.

I doubt we'll continue to work on it, but if we were, I'd want to work on the aforementioned environments, maybe emphasize the "nightmare" scenario a bit more, make the people wander around a bit more realistically such that they don't slam into walls, and add more customization to how they spawn and behave in order to introduce some more interesting scenarios.

Actually, the concept actually reminds me a lot of Disc Room which uses different challenge conditions for each area to keep things fresh and get more mileage out of a limited set of rooms. Perhaps a progression system based not just on getting to the exit but, say, surviving 30 seconds or bumping into fewer than 3 people would add a more interesting layer of challenge to proceedings.

Still, it was a good time, it was nice to get (most of) the band back together, and, most importantly, we made a thing that exists. What's better than that?

Play People! Panic!!! in your browser!.

#gamejams #mygames #vraustinjam #flatlandvr #vekwars #thevrddimension #vr #ludumdare #jocelyn #sla9b #peoplepanic