Akzidenz
Akzidenz is an indie game developer and co-host of five game jams including the 20 Second Game Jam which received over 500 submissions. Akzidenz has published 12 games on Itch, and their latest game, Too Easy, subverts player expectations.
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
I have a mixed background beginning with art school. I have worked as a multimedia/web designer and
developer, advertising art director and copywriter and now work in a management role in a small
software company. I've always had an interest in interactive design, especially on the more creative
end, but I've done less and less of it over the years.
What inspired you to get into game development?
In 2020, stuck in COVID lockdown, looking around for ways to mitigate the looming sense of dread, I
started looking around at game engines. Making games is something I had wanted to try and most of
the skills involved are ones that I've either done professionally or as a hobby at one time or
another so it was a natural fit. I published my first little game on itch.io in 2020, at the age of
49. I came late to this party but you'll have a hard time getting me to leave.
Why did you choose DragonRuby?
I auditioned some game engines and didn't find anything that suited me particularly well. I've
worked with a lot of different tools over the years and I have a few opinions about the way I want
to work. I like to be able to build things from the bottom up. I have a loose idea I want to try, I
work on it, I discover things I like and lean into them, or I discover things I don't like and
change them. The more a program wants me to do something in a given way, the harder it is for me to
experiment with different ideas, evaluate them and iterate. Some engines that I tried seem to be
geared towards making the same kind of games as everyone else and just tweaking them or dressing
them up. That's not something I want.
I found DragonRuby Game Toolkit by chance when I was looking through an itch bundle and decided to check it out. Two hours later I had most of the abilities I needed to be able to make a simple 2D game and iterate on it. It ran fine on my little laptop, allowed me to publish to web and desktop platforms with ridiculous ease, gave me an upgrade path that would let me publish to mobile and consoles in the future and wasn't creatively stifling. Then I found the Discord, the phenomenal community, the passionate and accessible development team.
How did you come up with the idea of 20 second games?
The 20 Second Game Jam started life on the DragonRuby Discord. There hadn't been any game jams for
the DragonRuby community so a few of us decided to set one up. We wanted to make a low-stress jam
with a low barrier to entry that would be as appealing to beginners as it would be to experienced
devs. We settled on the theme of 30 second games to help participants manage the scope of their
games while also posing a design challenge.
Amir Rajan, one of the creators of DragonRuby, suggested we lower the time limit to 20 seconds. Somewhere locked away in the vaults of the Game Developers Conference there is a presentation that explains how 20 seconds is the average time a player will give an indie game before making up their mind to keep playing or jump ship. I still haven't managed to find that video but the principle is a good one. Indie devs have an absurdly short time to make an impact on the player and 20 seconds is just about long enough for one turn of a good, fun game loop.
That's how the TeenyTiny DragonRuby MiniGameJam started. For our third year, we decided it was too good to keep to ourselves. So we changed the name to the 20 Second Game Jam and opened it up to the rest of the world, regardless of game engine.
What challenges did you face while hosting the 20 Second Game Jam?
There were a lot of participants which gave us some extra work to do. The jam attracted a ton of
spam submissions that had to be manually verified and removed. We had also decided to check that
every game follows the rules of the jam and that was time-consuming for the whole team of hosts.
People came to us with a lot of questions that really boiled down to the same thing: where exactly is the line that decides what is a 20 second game and what is not? Some questions we tried to clear up in the FAQ but most questions like this have specific example and we preferred to give them individual answers rather than give some kind of exhaustive list of dos and don'ts.
One thing that we expected to have more trouble with was community management but it turned out not to give us much trouble. It was a genuine pleasure to hang out with the participants in the jam's discord channel.
My own biggest problem was that the jam became my main focus after my day job and my home life. There was a real danger that I wouldn't be able to complete my own game for the jam. When it became clear that I would not have time to complete the game I was working on, I quickly threw something together with a much smaller scope.
What can you tell about your experience with the co-hosts of the jam?
The current jam hosts came together for our previous jam and I hope everyone can stick around for
the future because it's a great team. It's not a full time job for any of us and we need to be able
to rely on other people to step up when real life gets in the way. Making decisions, big or small,
is much faster with team members who are able to express what they do or don't like and are willing
to be flexible. Verifying that the games followed the jam rules would have been an overwhelming task
for a single person.
What inspired you to make the game, Too Easy?
Due to lack of time, I ditched the game I was working on and pivoted to something that could be
executed quickly. The simplest game I could think of was to take the most basic interactions (click
this thing, drag that thing, rollover this thing) and string them together into a continuous
20-second experience. Each interaction takes a second or two to perform and it demands a little
skill to figure out what you have to do next. But it's a bit flat as an idea so, to make it spicy,
the second half of the game is a repeat of the first half with a cruel twist: the mouse axes are
inverted, rotated or otherwise altered in a way that messes with people's expectations.
I had a lot of fun picturing players when, suddenly, nothing behaves the way they think it should. I didn't want to spoil the surprise so the presentation of the game is intended to reinforce the easiness of the first part of the game and the difficult part is only hinted at. I got a good few bug reports from people who thought the mouse input was broken.
What plans do you have for the future in game development and game jams?
I'll keep on making games and making jams. I find them both to be rewarding activities. I'm
particularly enjoying making amateur games without deadlines, deliverables or market driven goals so
I don't have any plans to move into professional game dev. If, by accident, I stumbled onto a way to
continue to have fun while making some modest income from games, that would be great, but I'm not
chasing it.
What advice do you have for someone who wants to host a game jam?
There's very little risk in making a jam so don't be afraid to try something even if you're not sure
it will work. In the worst case scenario, people won't join.
Getting people to join a jam is always going to be a challenge unless they already know your name. I'm not sure if we solved that. The jam was featured by itch.io a few days before the start date and that gave it a massive boost in visibility. So the best advice I can give is “be a featured jam”. How games get featured by itch is still quite opaque to me though.
Aside from that, try to have a simple idea and communicate it clearly. Like games, people will only give your jam a few seconds to persuade them to stick around so you have to make them count. The name of the jam should already be telling people what to expect. If you can't do that, the next line after the title should make everything understood. If that doesn't do it, simplify the idea.
Published on 17 January 2023