When signing up for the collab (or Game Jam), people should list their planned work hours for the collab. We talked about matching skill levels to a degree, but the reality is that people should be on a close time schedule when working. I know some of us work night shifts or live in Europe.

What do people think if we do a 48 hour collab, of making a rule where the final product has to be distributable without requiring compiling. IE a zip file of compiled code or a basic installer or something. I think we spend lots of time creating games without thinking about how to distribute them, so it would be nice. Also, it would make it easier for others to try out/provide feedback. I don't have unity installed so I wouldn't be able to compile a Unity game without a fair amount of work.

Okay, RB and I talked about a fair amount more, but I'll wait for him to post all that!

I just keep thinking about that last post.

I think it illustrates why we need to pin down what we feel is the purpose of collabs. There were two ideas there that are actually wildly different. The first would encourage a wide assortment of possibilities. Somebody might say, "I want to work on a particle system. Anybody who wants can join me." Or, "I'm working on my game and wouldn't mind having a few other people jump in and help with tasks X, Y, Z, for a few hours."

The second idea would largely exclude that, in exchange for more of a focus on making little game prototypes that aren't clones of existing games.

Which itself is fairly different from what we've done with collabs in the past; those have nearly always been cloning an existing game.

Which path we want to pursue is largely a function of what we collectively want to get out of the collabs.

Perhaps people say, "This is what I'm doing. I could handle 3 other people joining me if they want." In theory, if your idea doesn't gain support, you might decide to switch to somebody else's idea instead. So rather than deciding on a single idea up-front, it happens a little more organically. This might be helpful for the future, because we're likely to hit any reasonable limit on the number of people who can reasonably work on a small project like that. On the other hand, you may just end up with a bunch of people who are all just working on their own thing, which is less good.

Rebrand collabs as a Game Jam. It's not fundamentally all that different from what we've been doing in the past, but I think the name change alone inspires a lot of different ideas than what we get from a collab.

The idea of 12 hour or 48 hour things instead of 8 also came up. Especially in the context of a game jam, expanding the collab to a full weekend could be interesting. It's a bigger commitment. But you might also get more done.

1. I'm not sure what the purpose is. The first thing I posted in the competition retro thread is what I felt was the underlying purpose of the competitions were. (A way to help people make serious progress on their game projects, and incorporate game development into their lives.) I'm having a much harder time pinpointing what I think the underlying purpose of collabs are.

I think it's important to define this, because everything else is determined by this. Is it working? It's hard to tell if we don't know what "working" is supposed to look like. Is doing X a good idea? Impossible to determine without knowing what "good" means in this context.

I have a few loosely defined purposes. Something about learning from each other, and something about people getting experience working with others.

So I guess the first point of discussion that I'd like to introduce here is, what do you guys want to get out of the collabs?

2. I should consider personally taking on a smaller role in the collabs. I don't need to run the show on these, and I don't need to be the one dictating architecture. I'm happy to do that, but I'm also happy not doing that. Perhaps it is worth me letting go of the reins here a bit.

3. With how vague the purpose of collabs is to me (to be clarified over the coming week) I don't think we're wrong to consider some wildly different structures for the collabs.

I brought this up in the chat room at one point. Depending on what we want to accomplish in the collabs, there are plenty of other ways to structure them that might get us better results.

An idea that I had might be a sort of Round Robin style collab. Instead of everybody working on the game simultaneously, we pass it around. Everybody is in a circular queue (so it wraps around when you reach the end of the list). When it's your turn, you have 2 days to spend no more than 1 hour changing the code. You commit your changes, and pass it on to the next person. After some number of months (maybe a year as the upper limit) we'd quit and switch to a different project instead.

We'd be working together to build a game, but you'd have flexibility in terms of what you work on and how you do it. And you have flexibility in terms of when you would do the work as well.

I'm not saying, "This is the best idea and we should immediately get rid of our other collabs in favor of this." I'm just exploring and brainstorming. Feel free to do the same. (And also feel free to say that you think the original structure is a better fit for accomplishing what you want to see in the collabs.)

This discussion will culminate in a meeting this coming Saturday, the 21st of January in the #site-planning channel in the chat room at 7 pm UTC-0 time, which is 12 noon Mountain Time, and 2 pm Eastern Time.

If that time doesn't work for people (we didn't have anybody actually there for the competition retro this last week) then we can move the time. Just speak up.

Otherwise, feel free to post your thoughts here or in the #site-planning channel in the chat room!

1. Nobody really showed up. It was mostly just me. Emblis was around and made a few comments, but it was more or less just me. That's fine if everybody was able to say what they wanted to say in the chat room or forum ahead of time. If this particular time isn't a good time for people, I can pick a different time. We've got the same block reserved for the Collab Retrospective next week, and I had plans to start up other discussions for other weeks after that.

2. We're done with themes. If somebody wants to replace them with something, I think we can consider that. But for now, we'll just abandon them.

3. Competitions will no longer encourage people to try to make a complete game during the competition time frame. Starting fresh is fine, but so is continuing an existing game. Completing a game is great, but not finishing is fine too.

4. We've talked about some form of accountability, but not decided on anything. (Standup, end of sprint forum posts, live sprint demos, etc.) We all seem to generally agree that something like this would be useful, but there's no consensus on what it ought to be.

I might suggest at a minimum, we do our live demo (or pre-made demo) only once, at the end of the competition. We can reserve an hour or so on the last day of the competition where everybody plans on showing off what they've accomplished.

The other things are good ideas, but those things would be optional in that case. (And obviously, nobody can make you demo your game at the end of the competition. So technically that would be optional too, just strongly encouraged.)

That's my current suggestion, but this is the first time it has come up. So it is still very much undecided right now.

5. Refresh Achievements. There was broad support for achievements. We missed achievements in the last competition, not because they aren't worth it, but because somebody (ahem…) got lazy and didn't repost it.

Perhaps we should make a central place for all achievements, rather than reposting a thread every time.

Perhaps we should clean up the achievements, now that competitions are somewhat different than before. Remove ones that don't drive us forward somehow (or don't otherwise justify their existence with humor). Add in more that will help us do the things we want to get done.

Maybe we should separate them into three categories: gold, silver, and bronze. Gold badges/achievements are the hardest to get, and show extra dedication to game development.

Maybe we can come up with a system where it's easy to add colored badges to your game's thread for what you've accomplished.

All of those are big "maybe"s. Nothing has been formalized at this point.

6. Replacing the "Make a Complete Game" Goal with Something Else We've removed the need to finish a game, which is the fundamental driving force to the competition before. It feels to me that if we remove that, you have to replace it with something else.

Obviously, the first rule there is going to be that it needs to be decided by the individual.

I put much more detail in the chat room, but I think I'd push us to make the things you commit to not be about goals you want to accomplish, but about the process of getting there.

That is, while these are good goals:

• I want to make a game during this competition.
• I want to add networking to my game this competition.
• I want to get this game to a point where I can playtest it.

These are better:

• I'm going to spend at least 10 hours on game dev this week.
• I'm going to spend the time before work doing game dev, when I'm the freshest.
• I keep doing [X] instead of game dev, so I'm going to do at least 30 minutes of game dev before doing [X] on any day.
• When I sit down to do game dev, I get distracted by [Y]. To address that, I'm going to put my phone in another room, turn off notifications for the chat room, and turn on Strict Workflow on Chrome to prevent those distractions.

What you commit to should be about the process, not about the target. The target is always hard to estimate. You shouldn't fail your mission because game dev is hard or because we always underestimate how long things take, or some bug beat the snot out of you one week. Rather, you should fail because you didn't follow through on your commitment.

And maybe it doesn't have to be a "live" demo either, but a pre-made video.

2. I also agree that Starting a new game and finishing it in a month is not the right course of action. I suspect I only say that because I haven't followed that 3 of the last 4 (or something) competitions that I've been in.

3. I really like the achivements, An Idea I had was that we rank the achievements (like you say below), and make them more like "achievable" verses just goofy things that may or may not happen in your game.
THEN, we have a medium sized list of them that you can go for 1 - 3 at a time instead of going for all of them.. which means you can read the list and pick whatever suits you for the upcoming week.

4. Meh, Money.. I like giving away games, or even buying "things" off of amazon for people as a self initiated goal.. but I don't think trading money around would work out for me. Or forcing anyone to do it. (but I figure that's obvious)

5. We could just say a minimum of one person needs to present via twitch or even on discord. If nobody volunteers you can pick someone. (they did join the competition after all, there are SOME rules you can force upon people) But that is a worst case scenario. I expect to present at least once and I wouldn't be surprised if we had several people presenting instead of the minimum of one.

6. Hmmmmm….. Maybe if one of us streamed (or all of us) and somebody else (RB.. who else? lol) sortave tutored while watching them.. gave them pointers.. or maybe 1 on 1s with RB with questions pertaining to game dev.

I liked the achievements as well. Perhaps we should plan on doing some brainstorming on good achievements too, though I do like our old list. I'd definitely be open to discussing how we could make achievements even cooler. So if you've got ideas on those, I'd love to know about them too. Here might be a few thoughts:

• Greatly reducing the number of achievements (for the sake of manageability) but then creating little badge icons that you can include on your thread for your game.
• Giving each achievement a Gold, Silver, or Bronze level for difficulty to achieve, and some sort of thing like the last bullet point.

Awards

Another thing we did once that is worth bringing up again is that one time we did awards. People took games that they had on Steam and gave them away to people who did the best in some particular category. I'd love to know if people think those might be worth reviving.

A Comment About Complete Games in a Month

I've seen a couple of people here and in the chat room mention that they don't think they could build a complete game in a month. I still think it's possible! (Though I'll admit I feel that this is irrelevant at this point, because I think the growing consensus is that the goal should not be about making a complete game anyway, but about getting things done on your game.) Don't you think you could make Tic Tac Toe in a month? What about Pong? What about Breakout? I think it's all about scope and choosing something that you can get done. Furthermore, I'd argue that while you may not be able to complete your grand vision for a game, I think it's possible a bigger game could be "complete enough" to begin playtesting after a month. Enough to start to give it to people to see if it's actually a good game or needs some tweaking.

Again, that's probably irrelevant with the way the rest of the conversation is going, but I still maintain any of the people who have done one or two of these competitions in the past could in fact make a complete game in a month.

Sprints/Code Rounds as the Competition

I mentioned this in the chat room idea in the chat room. While I don't have any particular love for this idea, I'm sharing it anyway because it might give somebody another idea that might make this work well.

PiscesMike mentioned that his hardest problem is that life/distractions get in the way, and that the code wars/sprints/rounds/whatever-you-call-them are a useful tool for getting stuff done. I suspect that's true of nearly all of us.

Taking that comment to an extreme - which was not PiscesMike's intent, but I did it anyway - what if the competition was more about how many rounds you complete instead of completing a specific game?

Perhaps you could compute a score where you got 10 points for every day that you completed at least one 25-minute block of completely uninterrupted effort on a game.

Or perhaps you could score a point for every 25-minute block that you complete during the month.

One huge drawback to this is, of course, not everybody has been doing work with the sprints/rounds.

Another huge drawback is that in attempting to get a high score, you might burn yourself out on the game, which violates one of my core principles for the competitions.

Again, it's not that I like this idea especially, it's that when brainstorming, all ideas are worth bringing up. You don't know if an idea is good or bad until you have enough of them to compare. And this might inspire one of you to have a good idea that turns my bad idea into a great idea.

We Don't Have To Trash Everything

By that I mean, I think all options are on the table. We can change anything we want about the competitions, but we don't need to (and shouldn't—not all at once anyway) change everything. We should probably just pick a handful of things that would be worth trying out on the next comp, and then maybe plan on another short retro at the end of the next competition and keep revising.

Any Thoughts on Competition Length?

I know this is a topic we've already considered when we were scheduling things, but competition length is still on the table. So if you've got something that you want to say about it, please do so.

Likewise, any feelings about the 4 competitions per year thing? And the spacing that we currently have set up? (4 30-day comps, arranged in pairs so that Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter can be turned into 100-day competitions if you include the time between them.

I agree with RB about dropping the themes (they were fun for the first few competitions, but really haven't been important for a while now), moving the focus of competitions off of starting a new project every time, and doing more to encourage a discussion of the game development process itself.

However, I'm not interested in the idea of staking money on the progress I make in competitions (I don't think I'd find it particularly helpful or enjoyable), and I don't think our ideal for sprint reviews should involve a live demo, for a few reasons. First of all, as Brett pointed out, one week of progress is typically not going to be enough to warrant a demo, even as a simple checking-in. Second, it takes enough set-up and time to put together a weekly live demo that would probably inadvertently discourage new-comers or casual participants from joining in on sprint reviews. Instead, I think we should simply encourage a weekly text update (around the lines of what I've been doing recently, that outlines what was accomplished and what the goals are for the next week) so that it's easy to provide updates that don't have to be awesome, but still something that has some sense of accountability.

In my opinion, a really important part of the competitions is the motivation it provides for consistently doing some game development, and we've discussed that the basic principle of signing up and making a thread for your project makes you more likely to follow through because of all the people you just told your plans to, but I think regular updates is an important extension of this and should be easy enough to join in on that there isn't a hesitation to do so, which is why I think we should encourage weekly text updates as the ideal (although certainly anyone who wants to do a live demo or record video or something else would be more than welcome to!).

I'd also like to see the achievements come back. Even if they were to drop off again, I'd like to give it another shot, because I think it's a fun way to feel like you've accomplished something without necessarily having an amazing game to show off, or if all of your progress was under-the-hood work. Rather than a week spent optimizing or cleaning some code up feeling like a waste of time (not that it is, it can just feel like it), there's still some potential gratification. Also, it's a good way to keep track of your progress and look back on what you've gotten done. I don't feel too strongly about this if no one else is interested, but I do think it could be beneficial. (I think it only dropped off last time because we forgot to re-post the thread. I could be wrong about that, though.)

I don't have any particularly creative ideas of my own (at least not that I've had the energy to come up with this past week), so I'm going to leave it there. Besides, if I write much more, the readability of my sentences is just going to keep decreasing, haha! I'm hoping that I'll at least be around to lurk during the discussion tomorrow, but no promises.

Good to see your thoughts placed down. Thank you for writing. A couple of thoughts I had:

For "Sprint Reviews", when I work on my own, I often do not produce enough material to show others in one week of time. It probably takes me a couple of weeks to add something to the project that I would feel would be worthy of showing others. If I was putting 40 hours a week into the game that would be a different story, but I'm probably only working a dozen hours a week on it and progress is even slower when I'm learning as I go.

I really liked standardizing ONE WEEK SPRINTS in the collab a while back. It really worked out well to try and report every Monday on the progress made and lay out the goals for next week. I think we should try to encourage this as much as possible. It was even really helpful for me to set expectations for myself like saying, this next week I don't plan to make any progress because of a xyz. Then I could pick up the week after with the right level of goals since I would have more time.

For point 2, it doesn't really matter if it takes a month or a year, as long as we learn to let go of ideas that won't pan out, and run with the ideas that are good until they are finished. (I still think unless you have a LOT of experience and are working full time on a small game, one month is unrealistic.)

I agree the themes are not very useful. I think they have some usefulness in helping come up with ideas, but I don't know that it is worth continuing to invest in.

This post is kind of long, and probably kind of a lot of rambling. But it's mostly me just brainstorming. Hopefully some of the ideas in here get you thinking about it too.

I think I mostly want our competition retrospective on Saturday to in fact be a brainstorm session on what we could do with the competitions. We've been doing them a specific way for so many years now, but I'm hoping we can take a step back and think about what we would do if we could change them anyway we want. Because indeed, we can change them any way we want. (Don't get me wrong; there's a lot I like about the current comps. I just don't want us to be shackled by trying to keep them the same as they've been in the past.)

My Purposes for the Competitions

1. A vehicle by which people can figure out how to make game development integrate into their busy lives. This is one of the reasons I pushed for a 30 day competition instead of a weekend-long one. With just a weekend, it's easy to put the rest of your life on hold. With a month-long competition, you can't do that. You have to figure out how to make game dev a priority. How to build a process that works for you that allows for forward motion in game development.
2. It needs to be practical. It needs to be real. It should be about making real progress, not nibbling around the edges or just reading some tutorials. Those things are OK to do among the real progress, but the goal should be about attempting to make something real.

One thing that I suppose I might point out on this list is making a complete game. We've structured the comps around "make a complete game in a month." While I feel strongly that it can be done (but been personally proven wrong 9 times in these comps because of grand visions and scope creep) I really don't think that completing a game is necessarily the right focus.

The Principles

If I were to hand the project of "make competitions work" to somebody else, I would only be OK with that if they did the following:

• Completing games is the nominal goal, but as long as serious participants come away feeling like they're much closer, then it's a success.
• Given enough competitions, a person would, in fact, have a complete game. It might be a lot more than one. But the goal of producing actual games needs to be a real target that can be hit.
• People come away with a better process for handling game development in their busy lives. Work, school, family commitments, social activities, exercise, resting, relaxation, other hobbies are all important. Game dev shouldn't trump all of that. It should be woven into people's lives. A strong process or pattern for doing game dev will eventually produce games.
• A sense of community among participants. You don't necessarily need others around you to make games, but it does help when you know you're not alone on the journey.
• A focus on sellable games. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with somebody making a Breakout clone for their first game. But there should be a sense that the ultimate plan is to make games that can actually be sold—both in the sense that you don't infringe on copyrights and patents, and also in the sense that you're making games that are meant to provide true entertainment/joy/value to people to the point where they're giving up coffee or a trip to the movie theater to buy your game instead.

The Vision

The perfect vision of the future for me on these competitions would be if everybody who was a serious participant would come away with a functioning game that could be sold to actual customers, or maybe sold out to another game development shop. Everyone who participates in the competitions would be able to say, "I made a game!" Or better yet, "I shipped a game!" Or even better, "I made $X by selling a game I made!"

And I think just as importantly, people don't come out of the competitions feeling like they need to catch their breath or make up for lost time in "real" life. Game dev would simply find its place in people's lives, and neither be completely forgotten after a competition, nor take up too much of a person's life during the competition that they have to stop for a while. Obviously, things ebb and flow. You won't spend exactly the same amount of time on game dev every week. For some, summer (or winter) might be better suited for more game dev. All of that is expected. The key is that it becomes a natural part of life for those who want it to be.

Some Ideas…

Hopefully that all lays some groundwork for the competitions. At least I hope it helps define my perspective on it. Please, please feel free to add your own comments like the above if you feel so inclined.

But for now, I'm going to turn to some specific thoughts I've been having. These are brainstorming-style ideas. I don't mean for these to "become law" or anything like that. Just things to talk about. Maybe give you inspiration on a related idea or something.

1. I think the whole thing with themes has kind of fallen by the wayside, and I think that's because it hasn't been a valuable tool to people. Everybody seems to already have another idea on what they want to accomplish already, and the theme either fits it or it doesn't. I don't think we've really seen even a single occurrence of somebody picking a game based on the theme. And based on the above, I'm not sure it even is useful in driving the fundamental goals of the competitions forward anyway.

So I personally don't feel any need to even consider themes in future competitions.

Though I wonder if we can come up with a replacement for it that could be more useful.

2. I also no longer feel that encouraging "start a game from scratch and finish it in a month" is the best course of action. I feel (perhaps incorrectly) that a game can actually be made in a month (we do make "complete" games in a day during the collabs) but competitions shouldn't encourage abandoning previous games and starting over necessarily (though it can be a legitimate option if your old idea has grown stale) nor do I think it should be focused on completing a game in the time frame.

As a side note to that, I think that's been one of my problems in the past. The moment I realize I have way too much to complete by the deadline, I drop the project entirely. That happened with my Frost and Flame/Orbital Defense game, as well as my Plastic Space Battles game. In retrospect, I consider the move foolish. But I can't change the past.

3. The achievements are something I like. They add flavor and color. But they're not exactly easy to manage, and while I personally like them, I'm not sure what the group consensus is on them.

4. Some days, I think the thing that will actually make me make progress is to put money on the line. It's an idea we've stirred around in the past. And I could make this happen without inflicting it on anybody else, using stickk.com or something. But I wonder if there's other interest or related ideas to this in other people's heads.

5. We've talked about doing "sprint reviews" of sorts. I want to bring that idea back up again. The idea might be something to the effect of getting on Twitch (or Discord, if we can get the screen sharing feature added before the next comp) and doing a 5 minute demo for each project. It would be very casual, but would kind of force you to make some progress during the week so you have something to show.

6. I wonder if we shouldn't spend more time talking about the process, and less time talking about the goals. Discussing how we're making game development actually happen, rather than just deadlines for this and that.

I think I've got more rattling around in there… I might post some more thoughts later.

Again, if you aren't going to be around for our discussion on Saturday and have some thoughts, please post them here, or say something in the chat room. (I might be a little upset at you if you say, "I was hoping we'd do X with the competitions but I didn't say anything because…")

Please take a peek and add your own thoughts, or come prepared next Saturday to brainstorm and discuss!

The purpose of a retrospective is to stop and think about what is working about the overall process and structure and what isn't. Then talk about how we can make it better. I think the competitions have been very fruitful, though I think there is always room for improvement, and that's what we're aiming for here.

If you've participated in a competition before, I'm sure you have some thoughts on this, and I really want to hear them and work as a group to make the competitions even more valuable to us.

Like this last week with the scheduling, I want to plan for a time for us to get together in the chat room and talk (type) about what we think has been working and not working for the competitions, and what we want to change.

I don't have any other suggestions yet, so I'm going to just say that we'll aim for 12 noon MST, which is 2 pm EST and 7 pm UTC-0, on the coming Saturday, the 14th of January. If you'd prefer a different time, speak up.

If you know you can't make it, please feel free to leave your thoughts on this matter here in the forum or in the #site-planning channel in the chat room.

The above diagram is more or less what we decided on.

In particular:

• Four total competitions during the year, each one being 30/31 days long. (Four weeks plus an extra weekend.)
• Two collaborations, with the possibility of adding in some more, based on the outcome of our Collaboration Retrospective in the next couple of weeks.
• The two competitions are paired up in such a way that you could run a 100-day competition spanning two of the competitions.
• The collabs are placed between the larger gap that lies between the competition pairs.
• We're anchoring the calendar at Memorial Day, so the Spring Competition will always start Memorial Day weekend. This point in particular is open for discussion still. (Technically it all is, but I don't want to keep changing our plans around every single week.) We could pretty easily pick up this whole wheel and rotate it around on the calendar.

The single biggest corollary to this discussion is that our next competition will begin on February 3rd and last through March 5th. That's coming up pretty soon!

If we do 4 competitions that would be one every 3 months. This would set aside 120 days or a third of the year.

Doing two 30 day and one 100 days sets aside 160 days of the year, which is well over a third of the days.

I think either solution is good. I kind of like the idea of for 30 day competitions because it would be easier to roll into them as appropriate. I also think some serious game-making could be done in a 100 day span. So I lean a little more towards only 30 day competitions, but not a lot.

I like 30 day chunks of time for commitments. It is short enough to commit fully to participating in and also long enough to get some serious work done. And if I’m busy for that 30 days, I’m not missing out on too much by declining. I guess the benefit of a 100 day competition is that I can miss 2 weeks for a life event or just being busy and still get a lot done.

However, 30 days seems drastically too short for anyone working hobbyist hours to take a game from scratch to finished, so it is a little misleading to consider it a competition. I think even 100 days is probably too short a time to complete a game from scratch by any of us in our spare time. I also think the way we brand the competitions right now encourages everyone to start a new project each time.

I think the realistic timeframe for completing a polished game from scratch is 1 year. 1 year considering someone with a solid hobbyist background in programming/game design while working in their spare time. For someone who really knows what they are doing or for a simpler game, perhaps several months can be shaved off. Also remember that spare time comes and goes. Sometimes over the course of a year you have to put it down for maybe 2 weeks or even a month.

There is a tough balance between knowing when to quit a project and move on and when the right idea has been found. Sometimes it is hard to continue after 100 days of work. Am I burned out or will the game even end up being fun to play?

So maybe we need to move away from the notion of 30 day competitions where you start a new project every time. Perhaps it needs to be a 30 day sprint to work on your game of choice. We would encourage picking up existing projects over starting new ones. Of course there is nothing wrong with starting a new project, but if the goal is to complete a game, a completed project is better than a half dozen incomplete ones. (This is highly subjective statement. There is nothing wrong with having fun and making a half dozen incomplete projects and learning to be a better programmer.)

Maybe there could be a separate commitment to finishing a game by a certain date for people who really want to finish one. RB has proposed the end of 2017, but it could be any date far into the future. I would say at least 6 months out.

Perhaps we setup 30 day sprint where people get together to commit to focused work on their existing projects or start new ideas as needed. The 30 days fits to provide motivation and focused work time as a community.

All that being said, I have really enjoyed the 30 day competitions with you all, so I hate introducing new ideas that might damage them.