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