Plummeting from Orbit as a Creative Exercise
Dispatches from my first-ever Game Jam
ORBITUARY
There, mission accomplished. I signed up for a Game Jam, slapped together a halfway-presentable hack-job of a primary gameplay loop, and submitted it with a few hours to spare. It may be a patchwork agglomeration of royalty-free assets, and the code may be more poorly engineered than the Deepwater Horizon, but it’s finished and playable. It’s called Orbital Freefall 2037, and you can play it right from your browser on itch.io if you want. Fret not about wasting too much of your time — you’ll get the complete experience in about three minutes, or less if you skip the intro.
The event in which I participated was the peculiarly titled Gwueble Jam 2026, named for a portmanteau of its two primary facilitators.1 Its main theme was the phrase “Slow Burn,” and its optional, secondary theme was the word “chair.” These were revealed during a livestream on the Sunday before last — I was at a community theater production of 1776 at the time, learned about the theme during the intermission, and subsequently tuned out Edward Rutledge’s critique of Northern hypocrisy as I began subconsciously brainstorming.
When all was said and done this past Sunday, my submission was one of 185 total entries. There are material prizes on offer for the top-five placers, and results will be announced after the voting period ends this Friday. I’ve played enough of the other entrants’ work by now to lose all but an iota of hope of a top-five finish, but I learned even more than I expected and it was surprisingly enjoyable. I want to mention up top that I’m frankly awestruck by how kind and supportive the strangers on itch.io turn out to be. The direct feedback I’ve received thus far has been almost effusively praiseful, and there’s scarcely a trace of negativity to be found anywhere near this event. I’m kicking myself for not having tried this sooner, and I’m already looking ahead to some Jams I might try out in August.
But let’s not hitch the cart too far ahead of the horse. This week’s edition is a follow-up to last week’s outsider analysis of Game Jams, and we’ll move from theorizing to actual reflection. Final judgements are still to come, so all that remains for now is to extract some worthwhile takeaways from the experience. I’ll also try to play another few dozen video games in the next thirty hours,2 but that shouldn’t be a problem as long as I stay so intractably unemployed.
Here’s the plan: I’m going to tell you about my game, such as it is, and about the lessons I learned from piecing it together from spaghetti-code and phlegm over about a dozen working hours. I’ll close by drawing your attention to some of the more impressive projects I happened to play during the rating period thus far. Let’s begin, then, with a segment I like to call…
WHAT I LEARNED FROM HASTILY DEVELOPING A GAME ABOUT PLUMMETING FROM ORBIT
We might as well start with the title. After finishing the end-game sequence and declaring the project good enough for government work, I spent around fifteen minutes trying and failing to come up with a witty pun to use as a title. In lieu thereof, I settled on Orbital Freefall 2037, a matter-of-fact moniker that communicates the place, manner, and time of the game’s sole mechanic. For those of you without the time or patience to try it for yourself, here’s a quick look at what twelve hours of hasty effort bought me:
The game’s premise, expounded upon in the intro sequence whose implementation pissed away an hour of my precious time, is simple: a decade into the future, near space is polluted with the wreckage of orbital data-center satellites launched by tweaking billionaires made overconfident by pharmaceutical abuse. When your space station’s critical systems are destroyed by a hunk of space-crap, the crew elects you to pilot a jury-rigged landing vehicle back to the planet’s surface to summon help. The objective is to fall from low earth orbit to the ground without crashing into debris, and you navigate around it all by means of shifting your weight and selectively firing a rocket booster. The challenge is in dodging obstacles without overusing your engine, lest you run out of fuel and plunge into the ground at terminal velocity. If instead you succeed in making it to the ground, you’re rewarded with a vapid “You Win” message that stands in for the elaborate celebration I had vaguely imagined.
I’ll leave it up to individual players to judge for themselves whether or not OF2037 earns its sale price of nothing. My own verdict: I mean, it’s okay. I’d be pissed off if I’d paid money for it on Steam, but it would’ve kept me locked in for five or ten minutes if I’d found it on addictinggames.com back in 2007. That feeling alone is a surprisingly gratifying reward for my effort.
Gratification aside, here’s a list of my other principle takeaways.
1. JUST DO IT
You know, despite my towering intellect, ravishingly handsome features, and world-historical degree of unpretentious humility, I’ve never been all that confident of a creative. I’d been considering joining a Game Jam for months before actually doing so the other week, excusing myself each time on some tenuous basis that made it easy to pretend I was being responsible rather than craven. And, a few times over this past week, I slipped to nadirs of faith and hesitated about even bothering to submit my work.
But I’m damn glad I did. For one thing, my game — though mechanically insipid and thematically underrealized — at the very least holds a candle to the best work of my co-participants, and that’s considerably better than I expected for my first-ever attempt at releasing a game. For another, I came tantalizingly close to a prize-worthy end product. Had I joined a team or at least committed myself more thoroughly, I could’ve extracted a few dollars of reward money from the arrangement.
2. FOCUS ON THE PRIMARY GAMEPLAY LOOP
Alright, let’s very quickly recap: a primary gameplay loop is the moment-to-moment procedure of interfacing with a game as a player, independent of whatever that procedure is building or progressing towards. Examples: in Pac-Man, the primary loop is eating pellets while avoiding ghosts; in Super Mario Bros., it’s moving between platforms toward the right-most extent of the level; in League of Legends, it’s reading ethnic slurs in the chat window. You get the idea.
“Focus on primary gameplay” is extremely common advice for game-dev neophytes, and it’s only now that I can intuitively and viscerally understand why that should be. As it turns out, there’s a huge temptation, even very early on, to commit time and resources to polishing. Once I had an idea for a gameplay mechanic, it only took twenty or thirty minutes to prototype a character controller and an environment. Almost immediately thereafter, I started to get sidetracked with UI design, animations, and even a goddamn narrative background.
Of course, when you get down to brass tacks, these are all polish-related set-dressing as far as game design is concerned. And, although polish is certainly a crucial, unignorable aspect in presenting not only video games but indeed almost any media object, one really needs a smooth and structurally sound surface before one can polish with any mind toward improving the finished product. As I mentioned above, I spent around an hour putting together an intro sequence that, while vaguely amusing and decently effective at injecting my authorial voice into the project, adds practically nothing whatsoever to the overall experience. It’s time I could more profitably have spent on almost anything else. An actual ending, for example, instead of the sexless “you win” message that appears if you make it to ground-level. Point is, you really oughta finish baking the cake before you try to frost the damn thing.
3. THE BARRIER TO ENTRY IS LYING FLUSH WITH THE GROUND
At its highest and most professional echelons, game development remains a very challenging and intellectually strenuous pursuit. Of course, the same could be said of any kind of skilled work whatsoever. But for those of us getting in at the ground floor as hobbyists, it turns out to be remarkably accessible, and we have the steady march of technology to thank for this. Gone are the days when game-dev required an intimate knowledge of computer architecture and mathematics — any modern engine can take care of the gritty details of interfacing with hardware or computing matrix transformations, requiring little more than creativity and motivation of the user.
Nowadays, as the power and availability3 of computing hardware have increased nearly to the point of diminishing returns, game development has never required less domain expertise nor been more forgiving of cognitive blindspots. The proof is in the games themselves. As a personal example: at least one entry I played from this Jam was made in a drag-and-drop game engine designed for young people first encountering computer programming. As a broader example: Toby Fox’s Undertale, one of the most celebrated indie games of the 2010s, is said to implement all of its character dialogue using a switch statement with over a thousand cases.4 This all makes me feel awfully foolish for doubting my own abilities, especially given that I have actual, transferable skills as a one-time professional software engineer.
Meanwhile, my own choice of game engine — that is, Godot 4.7 — made trivial many of the tasks that I was dreading until it actually came time to deal with them. Exporting a browser-playable build of my finished game almost felt like cheating: I clicked a button to automatically download an HTML5 export template, and my whole project was transcoded to a fully playable WebAssembly build in less than a second. It’s similarly trivial to make native builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it all gives me reason to hold out hope for the platform-independent land of milk and honey toward which gaming advances in fits and starts.
4. GAME ASSETS ARE BASICALLY POST-SCARCITY
Relatedly, I’m only now beginning to truly appreciate the overwhelming availability of royalty-free assets5 available on the Internet. I must have spent at least a couple of hours just browsing OpenGameArt.org for sprites and background graphics, and could’ve spent quite a lot more had I not barely managed to refocus on the objective before me — it’s quite fun in its own right. OGA is just one among dozens of resources for free or extremely low-cost game assets of premium quality, and I consider it no exaggeration to say that one could build a career on releasing games that thoughtfully curate and flip these sorts of open assets.6 I suppose there are probably loads of indie devs doing exactly that, and I just haven’t clocked it before on account of how professional a result one can achieve by doing so.
Almost every last art asset in my project was made by someone else (and, of course, duly credited on the game’s page). Of those, around half were released straight into the public domain with absolutely no stipulations on their use, and the rest under highly permissive Creative Commons licenses that asked only for attribution.
And, before I move on from the subject, thank God for Kevin MacLeod.7 If even ten percent of us were as publicly minded as him, there would be no strife or conflict anywhere on the planet. Failing that, at least I was able to do justice to a track of his that I selected as background music.
Alright, that just about covers it. Final reflections: this was a damn good time, I created and released a technically finished game of which I’m somewhat proud, and I thoroughly recommend Game-Jamming to any of you reading who’ve ever considered it.
There are definitely a lot of things I’d have done differently, given a second chance. Join a team, for one — I decided not to because I knew I’d have a busy week and didn’t want to risk letting anyone down, but I think another few brains would’ve dramatically raised the ceiling of quality and even put me in contention for a podium-finish. Would’ve liked to provide some closure for my players, too — OF2037 makes a decent first impression, but a shit-awful last impression on account of how hard I rushed the ending. Lessons learned for next time, and I suspect said next time won’t be long from now.
Finally, let me leave you with a few other submissions from this Jam that are definitely worth your time if you’ve got a few minutes to kill:
CHAIRSONIST, which features what I believe to be a totally original gameplay mechanic in directing light through a lens to burn a target
Burn in Hell, the first game I’ve played since 2012’s NeverDead to feature ripping off your own head as a primary mechanic
The Hot Seat!, a nifty platformer with a unique movement mechanic, an intriguing premise, and high production value up to and including voice acting
I sure do appreciate your joining us for this detour from The Spieler’s usual programming, and I hope you learned a thing or two along with me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got another few dozen games to rate.
Thanks for reading to the end! With the Jam over and my schedule back to its baseline level of inactivity, we’ll return to our standard fare next week. If you end up playing my submission, I welcome your constructive feedback and your sardonic piss-takes in the comments. I’ll see ya next week.
To wit, the game-dev YouTubers Gwizz and Queble. I can heartily recommend their work to anybody interested in learning the Godot Engine.
Most Game Jams are judged by the participants themselves, who get an opportunity to play and rate everybody else’s submissions after the development period closes. This Jam had “only” 185 entries and most of them take only a few minutes to experience, so I consider playing them all a reasonable goal. God help me if I end up trying one of those 30,000-participant Jams later on.
...with several veiny, pulsating asterisks where RAM, GPUs, and mass storage are concerned, of course.
For y’all non-coders, this is like building a skyscraper in which every single office cubicle is accessed via its own staircase from the ground floor. It works, but it’s goddamn madness to behold.
By “game assets,” I refer to artistic output like graphics, music, sound effects, etc. that underlie every game.
It’s a slippery slope, of course. Those of you who were around for Steam Greenlight may recall the deluge of asset-flipped garbage that threw discordant assets together in order to quickly fart out commercially releasable products. As with all art, the difference between worthy effort and useless pablum comes down to effort and vision.
If you’re not familiar, MacLeod is a composer and producer best known for releasing high-quality, royalty-free music over nearly thirty years and counting. He welcomes redistribution and even commercialization of his work in return for nothing more than simple attribution.