Midway through our courses as Game and Simulation Programming students at Devry University we were tasked with a game project. It was an open ended assignment where we generated documentation, produced code and declared what would constitute our milestones. Feeling inspired by our experiences at the first annual Global Game Jam in 2009 we were excited at the prospect of completing an entire game by ourselves. We used the momentum from the event and began before the semester started on what would become our midterm project.

Initially we intended to complete the game we constructed at the game jam called Braindead but we came up against a few roadblocks. After extensive paper prototyping we decided to abandon the idea for a fresh one. Feeling that it would be difficult enough to complete an entire game on our first try, we settled on remaking an obscure old abstract strategy game one of us had played long ago. We ended up calling it Jojamian, a contortion of several of our initials.

You can play the game here.

We took this project seriously. Having decided our goals, we researched similar games online and evaluated the pros and cons of each minute decision we made in the design. We had set out to develop a complete game, not just a small portion of gameplay; we wanted a polished product. For us that included menus, tutorials and single- and two-player modes. We didn't use any starter kits or existing code bases, no pirated software was used and there were no outstanding or show stopping bugs. After 16 weeks we went from inexperienced developers having only cobbled together a small playable demo at the GGJ to inexperienced developers who had completed their very first game. The following postmortem was created after the project was completed in June of 2009.

What Went Right

1. Quality and Polished

The game we developed was polished. It met our goals and garnered interest from a publisher. From the outset we planned on keeping our scope small and not adding unnecessary tasks. We kept that state of mind throughout development. Often the team members heard "We've gotta keep it solid‚" when discussing certain changes. We may not have come out with an action packed graphically crazy game but we nailed the gameplay and player feedback.

2. Outsourcing Sound

We decided to utilize talent we had seen from a previous project. We outsourced our sound to another student we had met through the first annual Global Game Jam. We learned a lot about how to correspond with external team members and keep our ideas together. Several iterations of sound were created, and many of them were ultimately unused, but the ones we were able to implement worked well. The piece selection sound we have made many people laugh during their first game, which impressed us. After working with the sound and testing the game non-stop we actually grew rather sick of the sounds. From having outsiders playtest throughout the whole project we learned that they worked well and the players were completely fine with them.