Down2Jam is a new entry in the game jams family and I was thrilled to participate in the very first event. I’m always in search of interesting events besides major game jams to experience new formats and look at things from a different angle.

The theme was Train. After a two-hour-long midnight brainstorm we with the team decided to create a little game about a steam train with a tricky pressure valve you have to operate to keep your boiler from blowing up.

The initial design called for a pixelated 2D side view of a steampunk-styled train moving through the desert. At the bottom of the screen, you have a panel with a bunch of controls and gauges showing your speed, boiler temperature and pressure, etc… The player uses that panel to feed fuel to the train and move. Finally, you arrive at a station where you can do repairs, get resupplies, and trade in various commodities.

It was a good plan, except for being overly optimistic. It looked good on paper but crumbled facing harsh jamming reality. In the end, we barely managed to make a playable prototype - Pressure Valve Madness.

What went right

In the end, we got a pretty good steam train simulation. The steam engine model is awesome and actually based on basic thermodynamic principles involved in the actual engine setup. You feed the fuel and the train starts moving. I sketched a sprite for the locomotive, a cart and rotating wheels. We even managed to add a pretty satisfying steam and smoke particles coming out of the boiler. And the final explosion when the boiler blows up is totally epic (even through I used a bunch of premade assets for that).

What went wrong

Besides the moving train, everything else was cut due to the time constraints. Yet another jam that suffered from overoptimistic estimates.

The final hours of the jam were brutal with crunch to make the project into a minimal playable prototype. Completed assets for the parallax background were abandoned, and the steampunk controls ended up as generic buttons and indicators.

Stations and shops were out of the question, but we’ve managed to introduce a simple destination meter and a resupply dialog to have some kind of progress. Which was almost pointless, since we didn’t have any supply indicators anyways.

Dissapointment

The whole economic subsystem was supposed to be the meta fun over simple train driving mechanics. It worked so well in 300 Hearts for Escape and we wanted to build on top of that successful experience and implement an extended version. But in the end, we haven’t implemented even a simplified one.

I especially puzzled by the fact, that I hadn’t spent much more time back then. In fact, for Down2Jam I’ve spent an average number of hours - 33.

For comparison:

The stat shows a lot of 30+ hours, especially multiple 36h-sprints (which is relatively reasonable for a 3-day jam).

Why Failure?

Once again, we failed to prepare beforehand and spent much time setting up the project and getting familiar (once again) with the framework.

I have to get back to the basics of Collider.JAM project setup, update, and modernize it according to the recent experience. The whole setup should be done form a bunch of pre-made highly compatible patches. Currently, I still have to copy and adapt pieces of code from multiple projects. All these subsystems should be generalized and made available for easy reuse.

That epiphany allows me to create a roadmap for the next version of Collider.JAM - War Release 2. Keep tuned - new updates are coming!