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Weekend Warrior Jam Written on March 4, 2013, by danbrown.

This weekend Derek and Eric from SendMorePeople decided to arrange a game jam with a difference. Rather than pick a theme and make a new game we were to work on our ongoing projects but just try and get some new progress done while live streaming it. I thought that sounded good so I joined in.

Positives

• Seeing other people stream their dev process. I spent some time watching the SendMorePeople guys, Diado and SknnyWhiteMan live. I missed U1zeb live but saw a bit of the recorded Hangout.
• I got 3 big things achieved for Ape. First was an experiment to see if a third person camera would be a good improvement which worked out ok and we may stick with it. Secondly was to add the ability to use objects in the rooms which seems to work pretty solidly. Third was to finally add a start screen with a menu instead of jumping straight into the gameplay. I just got that mostly working before the end with a few bits left to tidy up.
• Fun to be involved and in public rather than hiding away as usual.

Negatives

• I didn’t do much to interact with the others. I should have not only watched their streams here and there but join in the chat and encourage them. Part of the reason I didn’t was that I wanted to get on with my stuff rather than keep stopping to be social. But also because in the SendMorePeople guys case that Google Hangouts isn’t really interactive unless you properly commit and use webcam + voice. I was using twitch.tv and the chat system is way easier for people to come and go and talk casually. Hangouts does have comments but they are kind of pushed to one side and I get the feeling that it is designed for listening/watching rather than taking part. Maybe the intent of the jam was for us all to be in the same Hangout rather than scattered which would have made a bit more sense, I’m not sure? Personally (introvert alert) I would rather do it how I did but be able to respond in chat.
• Technical problems at my end. Firstly streaming worked easily in Linux but it kept segfaulting. I believe this is due to my internet connection having a measly 300kbit upload rate that sometimes drops to 0 for seconds at a time, choking the feed and crashing it. Even when it wasn’t crashing the stream the upload speed was sometimes so low that it dropped me to a frame every few seconds on the website. I’m not in a position to switch from ADSL to cable broadband at the moment so not much I can do about that. I also didn’t manage to get sound working in time for the jam start. I wanted to have desktop audio so viewers could hear the music playlists I listen to (mostly Humble Indie Bundle OSTs) but didn’t have time to work out how to turn an output back into an input. Plus I wanted to (and did) use Skype (voice) over the weekend so didn’t want that broadcast on the feed. I will have to work out a better system for if I am able to stream again.
• I could have picked better visual things to do. A few times I spent an hour or so debugging some annoying thing (Bullet, grrrr) which would have been boring as hell to watch. I have left myself a few things to do this week where I stopped just to try and make it more interesting to watch.

note. For me the positives far outweighed the negatives despite it looking bigger above!

Suggestions

In case it runs again!

• A way to interact rather than going it alone (like I did!). Again, not sure what is best but must be something. Maybe an IRC channel so we can talk without having to jump around between web pages and lose our own progress waiting for replies? Or something like IRC but with a history would be better. A start ‘event’ might be good, even if it is just
• A page somewhere to see who is online and what they are working on may be a good plan, like the Mojam one but with a custom status line as well. Hard to monitor though without staff like they did or a custom page where the participants could log in and update.
• More visibility! I saw a post on Reddit about it about a week before the jam but it got buried pretty fast. The same went for the reminder the day before. I think the most I saw on anybodies stream was 5 viewers although it may have been more for Derek and Eric as they were the liveliest and as a viewer Hangouts don’t show how many people are watching (that I could see anyway). I briefly had 4 at the highest but people generally came and went pretty fast. On Sunday I had no viewers at all for most of the day. With my jerky framerate, complete lack of noise and being completely unknown I didn’t expect many but it would have been good to see it publicized more. Not sure how though to be honest.

Hopefully this will run again and I will have the opportunity to take part again next time. I absolutely enjoyed it and it seems the others did as well.

Thanks to Derek and Eric!

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