What follows is a crude translation of the original in spanish.

Like every six months, another Familiar Game Jam has come and gone. This time around is the sixth time around (#familiargamejam6), making a total of (I guess) three years of existance.

My personal experience through these events has been constant: I have participated in the last three editions and for each and every one of them I have made a game in a weekend (something that I am misteriously unable to do given months time…). During the event itself and the following hours there’s always the same sequence of emotions: concentration (when preparing), desperation (when fixing bugs), satisfaction (when uploading) and then this strange sense of emptyness and smallness when I see the list of games and really, really know that I am little less that a drop of water in an ocean. Later there are comments, reviews and it comes this new light that shines on everything and makes is seem a little different: not necessarily 100% positive, but there’s something sublime on it.

Anyway, my experience during the past weekend has been pretty much the same. The fact that I just keep coming back (even when a few hours before all I can think of is about taking a rest from my day job) means a lot: it means that the idea is addictive, the sensations are vivid and - more than anything else - the creative process is just so strong. In 48 hours we go from nothing to scribbled notes on paper, to images on a screen, to music in the air and this experience of creating something where there was nothing. There’s nothing quite like it (except, perhaps, music).

The fruit of this experience is Go: the game whose news you’re reading now. Go is not pronounced as in “going for a walk” but more like in “godzilla”, meaning “Five” in japanese and making a reference to the five elements on the traditional chinese conceptual scheme (chinese, japanese… all the same to us foreigners). Go is a game of adventure and traversal, small, but nice (as in a nice meal) but just don’t take my word for it: download it and give it a try.

Go is carried along by the theme “No characters”. This theme has been easy and hard at the same time. Easy because you can be literal about it and do any pure puzzler you want. Hard because maybe it’s too generic. Just take a look at all the uploaded games: each of them a different interpretation of the idea. So, we have this “easy-hard” theme, an old-snail-slow computer, hours of day job and a bit of disenchantment: it’s just understandable that I had my doubts about participating.

Doubts about an idea, an idea that I want to execute, an idea that I am technically capable of executing and that respects a theme. Translate that to many scrapped ideas (puzzles, de-personalization, player as a witness of events that can’t be changed…) until this idea of “wind” comes along. Yeah, the wind can be a protagonist, it doesn’t talk, it doesn’t have a personality but it certainly moves, carries things along and - in a way - acts of its own mind. So Go it is, a game about being the wind, about flowing around, moving leaves from one place to another, exploring little creaves… What could the wind do?. Oh well, only so much!!. There were lots of discarded ideas about interacting with elements, carrying things from and to places, solving puzzles… All of them discarded until the core of the idea is born: be the wind in a non-violent game.

Those of you who have played may have noticed that you can’t lose in this game. You can quit, you can get frustrated, you can rage at the computer but you can’t “die”, it’s just not part of the experience…With your keyboard you can influence in these events and make them come to an end but there’s no negativity there. That was just the push I needed to say “Ok, I’m in”. You know, at a certain point I just wanted to put projectiles there, so you had to evade them but, who’s shooting at the wind?. And why?. Isn’t it just a cliché? (not that this game isn’t a giant cliché, mind you)

So I won’t bore you with the details of the development (as I may bore my spanish readers) but let’s just say that everyting is a bit foggy in my head: take some experiment I had laying around, dismantle it, re-construct it with new pieces, design the maps, do the colors, try and make it make sense… Everything is kind of a single flow, from the moment I laid hands on the keyboard to the moment I commited the final changes. Then, of course, there’s the testing, the wondering if I could have done this or that on this or that other way… The important thing is that everything had a certain rhythm to it and that this rhythm was similar to the original planning I had scribbled (hooray for me).

Was it luck?. I don’t think so. I’ve been doing these so called post-mortems with every game I finish and I learn a bit more each time. For example, this time I learned to…

• Plan ahead and respect the plan.

• Do not condition exposition to resources: create your resources so you can tell your story.

• Use TTF fonts (for the love of all that is pure, just leave these bitmap fonts in the past!!!!).

• Try and have a coherent visual appearance: choose a palette, stick to it, make the most of your limitations. Somewhere there’s a world with colors and shapes you can do (believe me, I cannot tell gray from white but with a nice palette you can make a difference).

• Think about making a game. There are lots of things in the code of Go that aren’t “correct” or “standard”. That only means that I can devote time to “fix” these later. The game works, it just works. It can be all in a single line of code for as much as the players are concerned.

• Devote time to things that do really make a difference in the game. Leave ideas that don’t add value.

Anyway, these are just things I learned, but it’s important that I learned them deliberately.

Still, not everything has been good this time. Let me just talk about things I would do differently or I wouldn’t really do:

• Sound: Every game I think about devoting more time to this… Every time I fail. I have been lucky to find the soundscape I needed in the files for older projects but one time I may not be so lucky.

• More time for testing… That’s right. The game works but there’s some flimsy collisions here and there. Something are not as well conveyed as they could be and some things (I am looking at you, hint boxes) are just plain annoying.

• Participating on site: … Nah, who am I kidding?. I always say I would like to go, feel the ambience, talk to people but I seem to be really comfortable at home :P. For real, I am sure it’s a wonderful experience but maybe I should get used to work with other people first.

• Networking: not as in network code but as in “advertise” the result. I am not really sure I should learn about this… I mean, those who personally know me would understand that I’d just like to put the game there and let it be found by whoever has to find it… But sadly that’s not the way the world works. I have nothing against choosing to network the fruits of your hard work (as if it mattered what I thought) but I do little to support social networking as a whole. I personally think we’re all capable of having an attention span larger than fifteen seconds (no offense, please) and that we should choose really carefully how we communicate.

Before finishing… Some notes about the future of the game (because there seems to be a future there).

• There was planning done for a map screen. I read the comments. The map is coming :).

• There’s planning for changing the control scheme, it’s just unfair to everyone when we’re forced to play a certain way (and I am left-handed).

• Originally we would have had another piece of music. Dynamic music. Go slow?. You get this mellow guitar chords. Go faster?. This chords are now accompanied by melodies and decorations… Music is written, is just not recorded yet. I think it may do something for the game but let’s face it: the Gymnopedie number I that plays in game is just amazing.

• There are some little visual and aural touches to be done: have you gotten frustrated because you couldn’t activate a windmill and you didn’t know how fast you had to cross it?. There’s fixes coming. Did you wonder what to do with these elements or if you had placed them on the tree?. Fixes coming too.

• Finally, there’s an in game editor (for those who really, really, really, really want to see giant monkey gonads in the game). It’s remarkably quirky and sometimes plain unstable but it can be used and should be documented.

So we’re done with the future… What about the meaning, the story behind the game?. Ahhh well, there’s something but I’d rather have you playing it and, if need be, making up your own. There are these structures, windmills and doors that someone built, there’s this cycle (have you finished the game yet?) and the five elements but beyond that… What’s the deal with me and trees?. My last game had this little tree haiku at the end and this tree-related theme. Aaaaanyway, there’s this small story behind but it’s just in my head. I’d love to hear what’s in yours!!!.

Peace.