Can game jams affect your performance?

I am an avid game jammer (mostly online).

But as most game jams are short intense periods of creativity, where you see a blank screen turn into a functional prototype in a matter of hours and a playable game in days, does this affect our ability to be productive over longer periods.

If game development were a sport:

• AAA would probably be a two year ironman challenge.
• Mobile game development a 6 month triathlon.
• And game jams a Two day marathon.

I suspect that it can affect performance, as a developer on longer projects you can some times go whole days or even weeks working on bugs, mechanics, back end systems, optimisations and to anyone looking at the project they will probably not see the difference or not notice the lack of the bug or performance improvements.

So does too much Jam give you ADHD?

 

It absolutely *can* affect your performance. In particular, it's a temporary high that gives you the energy to keep going on longer projects. It also teaches you to scope things so that you can have smaller successes more often, and keep going longer because of that, too. It also gives you a little vacation from your work without actually stopping the use of your skills.

Do Hawaiian vacations give you ADHD? Do mobile games give you ADHD? Do TV shows make you too impatient to sit through movies? Do bears with soft toilet paper stop pooping in the woods?

 

Best forum quote ever.

 

I've done a variety of game jam or game jam-like projects (like #1GAM, Ludum Dare, etc) and my feelings are:

- In my personal experience Game Jams are best when you already have quite a lot of skills to bring to the table and want to motivate yourself to prototype something very rapidly.

-Game Jams result in the quickest dirtiest implementations that I can come up with; the kind of things that get functionality working -- but I could never live with to stay in my codebase, nor would I want to show that code to someone else

- Game Jams skip the hardest part of game development, seeing things through to the very bitter end.

Game Jams are like going on a series of relationships that last less than a year - they are a lot of fun, and as soon as it gets difficult you go on to a new one!

Some people swear by game jams, they think it is really good 'skill development'. I place myself in the other camp. Its a limited motivational tool, good to kick out a prototype in small time and discard if the results don't look too hopeful. As a development practice I haven't found much value it in personally.

 

I don't think so. I haven't jammed in ages, but regardless of the size of a project it should at some point be broken down into tasks of manageable size. Then you measure progress against the tasks, not simply against "is the game finished", and in that context it shouldn't matter if you're finishing tasks against a small game or a large one - a task is a task is a task.