The Freedom of Constraints: Game Jam Writing

 

I recently wrote and submitted an adventure for the Worm Jam. Ignoring the danger of exposing myself as a lazy hack, I thought I would write a little bit about my thoughts on game jams in general, as well as my process for this adventure.

Personally, I think game jams are great, and for me this can be boiled down to three main reasons:

• Inspiration: Game jams generally come with some theme, which can serve as inspiration for what to make.
• Constraints: Game jams usually come with some constraints, in particular in time, that limits the scope and forces you to finish.
• Community: Creating for a game jam means that you are writing for, and with, a community.

I usually have more ideas than I know what to do with, so the latter two are more important to me, and I will spend a bit more time on them.

While game jams are often constrained by theme or form, the hardest constraint is generally in time. From the start of the game jam, a clock starts counting down to the end, by which time a contribution should be finished and uploaded, or it will not be part of the jam. This creates a strong impetus to actually finish your project, rather than letting them languish in a WIP folder, and the duration provides an aid to scope the project correctly: you know exactly how long you will have to finish this when you begin.

Additionally, the limited time provides a comfortable excuse for "rawness". If you only have a month, nobody is expecting top professional quality work. You will probably not be commissioning art, or paying for editing. The jam is a prompt to make something, not to release a product. Somehow, this leveling on the playing field (even if it is never completely level - we all enter with our existing skill sets and connections) lowers the barrier to entry for releasing something.

Looking at my own output, it is quite telling that nearly all are game jam submissions. Funnily, this does not reflect my projects folder. The conclusion is clear, committing to a game jam makes me finish projects, to whichever standard I can in the allotted time, and that's good. I think. I'm generally happy with my output, and that's what matters (at least as long as I am not trying to sell anything).

The game jams also serve another purpose for me, and that is community. As a relative newcomer in the online RPG space, I don't really expect anyone to care about what I do. I'm just a guy uploading pdf's to itch. However, as much as I write because I enjoy it, I enjoy it even more if my work is actually seen (or perhaps even read! - I reckon played it pushing it) by other people. I am a social creature, and I would like to be part of the community of creators. As a relative nobody, game jams offer an accessible on-ramp: they naturally gather a group of like-minded creators, who will probably be interested in what the rest of the group makes. The jams are also often tied to Discord communities, where the creators gather and swap thoughts and feedback on their project. Suddenly, you're in community with your fellow RPG sickos!

For this specific project, Cladwell's Cul-de-sac, I essentially conceptualized and wrote the thing over two weekends. I always knew that I wanted to do something for the jam, because I think His Majesty the Worm is a cool project, but I thought that before I start writing something, I should finish reading the book, otherwise I would really be a hack. The book being big, and me being busy, took out the first two jammable weeks, and my day job being my day job, I was left with the weekends.

Part of what I love most about The Worm is its relationship with The Dungeon, and not having had the chance to play it yet, I was not really confident to start messing with its mechanics in the same way I have done for Songbirds 3e. Writing endless lists of e.g. monsters is not really my strong suit - I pretty quickly run out of steam, and again, I would like to have some actual play experience before I start properly thinking about statting things (Cul-de-sac does have stats, but I don't really see those as a core part of the work). What can I do then? I can make a dungeon. A full megadungeon level was something I felt was beyond the scope of the remaining jam time, so instead, I did something closer to a traditional "small dungeon", that was written in such a way as to be bolted on to a megadungeon. 

Connected to the greater underworld only through a single entrance, it could easily serve as an appendix, a cul-de-sac. Following the excellent questions for establishing your dungeon in The Worm, I asked myself why such a place would exist, and came up with the idea of some lord's "party dungeon". Chris Bissette recently published some dungeon maps under CC-BY on his Patreon, which I thought were cool, so I just used those for the two levels.

As good a method as any, I just wrote the introduction, keyed up the rooms, and started writing from the beginning (many rooms were just called "Room 3" or "Small room 2" until I got to them, deciding their content), jumping to the bestiary in the back whenever I had to add some stats, or take a break to "make" some art (i.e. turn a public domain image black and white to fit the aesthetic). I continued this way until I had all the rooms and their inhabitants, jumping a bit back and forth depending which rooms I had ideas for.

The second to last thing I wrote was the meatgrinders, which were some of the most troublesome for me, which was essentially because I had written myself into a corner that (I imagine) is not really typical for The Worm, but rather reflects my usual GM'ing style. The Worm is firmly in the space of what Brad of Between two Cairns calls "Door DnD". It's about opening doors and moving between rooms, dealing with the complications that arise. This is literally what the meatgrinder does! Random events in probably hostile rooms. But here, I had written a whole sub-floor of partying nobles and their servants, it made no sense to fill it with traps like the example meatgrinder in The Worm book. Rather than scrap everything I had done, I just did a less meatgrindy meatgrinder. We'll see how well it works that I have done a "Chat DnD" adventure for a "Door DnD" system, but hopefully it is still fun!

If anyone reads it and has thoughts, I am very curious to hear, and even more so if you actually end up running it! In the end, I am reasonably happy with how it came out, even if I lost sight of the loop of The Worm along the way. This is what happens in game jams, you make something experimental, and hopefully it's good, but the important thing is that making it was fun. And it was! Game jams rule!