so you're gonna join a game jam and that is super exciting and i highly recommend it if you're
even interested in joining a game jam i think it is a great way to develop your skills as a
game developer not just for vr but for any kind of game development from 2d to 3d to vr to even
ar game jams there's tons of game gems out there and i'm super excited that you're interested in
joining one but what do you need to do before you even start the jam what do you need to think about
what should you be preparing for so let's talk about a few of these things first things first is
you want to find a jam that you're interested in a lot of them have different themes or different
applications that you'll be using and even different time scales so like the game jam that me
and dinesh are putting on at the end of october is going to be a 72 hour game jam hio has tons of
game gems running all the time and to find them all you have to do is go to hio's homepage and
click on the jams tab up here and you can see some popular ones and then scroll down and just find a
jam that works within your time frame there's tons of them here you can sign up for any of them make
sure you're checking the rules and descriptions to make sure you're using the correct game engine and
tools and whatnot but feel free to scroll through this and find some cool jams see there's the vr
super jam so let's look at the vr super jam and i'll walk you through what you should be preparing
for what you should be thinking about and we'll just kind of talk about it so this is the jam page
that you'll be seeing you have a overview and then there's a community tab this is a good place to
ask for a team there's also discord if you're in a discord server with one of the creators of
the game jam so like mine or dinesh then those are good places to look for teams you can see how many
people have joined and how many people are going to actually participate in the jam so there are 70
people already signed up to participate in the jam you can see the dates we open on october 21st
and you will get your topic then and then you will have 72 hours till october 23rd at 6 pm
my time so this will automatically adjust based on your time zone and you have 72 hours for this
particular game jam it differs per jam to deliver a game start to finish with all of the art all the
coding all of the music it is a great way to build up your portfolio there's this countdown timer
shows you when the game jam is actually going to start you can click join jam you have to have an
itch.io account in order for you to actually be eligible to sign up it's a free account i highly
recommend getting one if you don't already have one because hio has a lot of free games you can
play as well and you can also play a lot of these games that are going to be out as well even if you
don't sign up for the jam you can still play the games there's a little intro video for our jam and
then sometimes jams will even have prizes so for ours we are offering over a thousand dollars worth
of prizes it's well worth your time and right now you have a you know 3 and 70 chance of winning a
prize which is super cool we talk about winning conditions so these will vary based on the jam but
ours is on technical prowess creativity how close you are to the theme how much fun it is and then
what your community rating is so because we're giving away prizes we're gonna have a community
rating but then also we have some a panel of judges to make things a little more fair and then
there's the rules there's always the rules so make sure you look at these the rules can vary from you
have to make everything from scratch to you can use any asset you have access to so for this one
we are actually providing you with a interaction toolkit so you'll get a link to a github page or
a zip file to download and this will get you to a starting point and this ensures everyone starts
from the same spot but any game engine is allowed any asset that you have purchased is allowed for
our particular game jam so if you have one that you like like hurricane vr i personally like or
vrtk which is free feel free to use those and those really help the game's overall quality and
it also speeds up your development time because you don't have to do it all and also teams i
highly highly recommend getting together a team of people it makes the gym much more fun you're
going to be getting very little sleep you'll be hanging out with these people for the course
of the whole jam it's super fun and you learn a whole lot about each other and about how you work
in a team under a stressful environment with little sleep so i highly recommend getting a
coder an artist and a musician and even maybe like a storyteller someone who's good at story concepts
or game idea concepts to put together in a team and of course these can all have overlaps but it
helps to each person have a specialty so like for instance when i did a jam last month i
was doing all of the coding and then i had an artist and then i had a sound technician to do
sound effects and background music and all that and then i also had a storyteller to help us make
the actual game structure and you know give us a little direction instead of just being like blah
but in the end the most important part of a game jam is to have fun learn some stuff and you can
build up your portfolio very quickly this way by racking up several game jams over the year you can
very quickly increase your portfolio and get hired a lot faster that way and end up making a lot more
potentially if you have a solid portfolio of game jams and then the last tip that i have for you is
leading up to the game jam i highly recommend you practice so pick a tool that you're planning on
using during the game jam usually jams will not allow you to start before the actual start date
but you can create other projects and go ahead and make like you come up with your own theme and
make a project based off of that get used to you know how the ai works or try to identify some of
your weaknesses of okay well i'm not too good at start menu so i'm gonna you know make a start menu
figure it out make sure i can you know get through the whole flow try to make a game start to finish
and a lot of these things like sound effects start menus really add a lot of polish to these jam
games make sure not to neglect that maybe practice some of these elements a little bit so you're used
to it and you don't have to learn it at the same time that you're making the game you want to focus
on making the game so do some learning beforehand and i'm actually going to help with that i'm going
to be putting out more videos about unity basics and getting up and running and how to make some
basic games i'm going to do a tutorial about hurricane vr and how to use that in a basic way
get that up and running i'm going to try to put out as many videos as i can leading up to this
game jam so you will be prepared as i can get you so if you are interested in joining the vr
super jam make sure to go to the link down below and sign up it's going to be super fun and i will
be playing every single game that gets submitted and doing some videos about some reviews about
the games afterwards doing some you know technical critiques and whatnot it's going to be super fun
might even do some live streams leading up to it answering some questions and all that fun it's
gonna be it's gonna be super cool there's thousand dollars worth of prizes on the line and uh right
now it's looking pretty good for your odds if you sign up so i will uh see you in the next one