Indienomicon MeGa Health Jam 2024

Written on: October 14, 2024

I had the pleasure of attending Indienomicon’s MeGa Health Jam this September, and it turned out to be one of the most memorable and rewarding game jams I’ve ever experienced. The event brought together an incredible community of developers, designers, and health industry experts, all focused on creating innovative games aimed at promoting health and wellness.

If you’ve never attended a game jam, I highly recommend it. They are an excellent resource to learn new skills, network and meet new people, and learn how to communicate effectively and complete tasks under extremely tight deadlines, plus, they’re just really fun!

Being a part of this experience has not only expanded my appreciation for game development but also sparked new ideas on how games can make a positive difference in people’s lives, and so, I wanted to share my experience of the event, and also some of the things I learned and improved on through this wonderful challenge.

The framework we chose to use to make our game was the Godot Game Engine, which has been rapidly growing in popularity recently. Our team was really eager learn more Godot and wanted to use this jam as an opportunity to make that happen.

However, apart from myself, none of my team members had any prior experience using or working with Godot. This is good, because game jams are actually a great place to learn a new skill, as you get real hands-on experience, and you are free to make as many mistakes as you need!

This did mean however, that I had to answer a lot of questions from my team members about the framework, as well as teach them how to use it, and also assist them with debugging various problems they had while trying to carry out their own tasks.

I was very enthusiastic to answer their questions and teach them about the engine, but our 48 hour time constraint put a lot of stress on me finishing my own tasks for the project. I overcame this issue by coordinating closely with our project manager to strategically rearrange development tasks according to the level of understanding each team member had with the framework during the daytime, so that I was able to complete my own tasks as well as tie together all of their work into a single cohesive scene in the evening.

Training team members and organizing code structure was key to ensuring all the art assets and major gameplay systems meshed well and worked properly. I’m really glad to have met such wonderful and enthusiastic team members who were eager to learn more about this wonderful engine and turn our final game prototype into the success that it was.

At the end we presented our games to a panel of judges and then conducted a demo in front of the other contestants. Although we didn’t win anything, it was so wonderful to see all the other games the other teams created, and I think “Wheels of Fate” win was very well deserved!