Game Jammers: Creativity as Code

A busted Mario costume. An extremely old pinball machine—so simple you wonder how pinball ever took off. Fighting games… so many fighting games. Hundreds of old consoles, some of which were complete flops, hooked up to hundreds of cathode ray tube televisions for maximum retro fidelity. High level Tetris players playing the NES version of the game in front of an exhausted crowd, resting up before returning to the show floor. The lady who does the voice for Princess Peach AND her faithful servant Toad in the Super Mario games, who will, if asked, do a shockingly loud Toad voice. 

These are the sort of things you see on the floor at the Portland Retro Game Expo, a yearly exhibition of video game culture and technology for vintage game collectors and dealers. Gamers are looking to relive their pasts and the pasts of others (who grew up with different systems or games), and, as with every gathering of ten or more people these days, Pokemon card collectors, hunting for the treasure their heart most desires.

But we are not here to linger in the past. We look instead to a pink and purple booth in Hall D, where 20 or so computers sit on tables, gamers on one side poking at programs, game developers on the other, chatting, pointing out stuff, offering light guidance, occasionally looking fretful.

This is the Portland Indie Game Squad’s booth, PIGSquad for short, a local nonprofit that exists to offer support, education, and opportunities for local independent game developers. On this weekend, they were hosting 38 local independent game developers sharing their new creations with players, the future of games nestled inside their past.

About 20 years ago, the twin emergence of the Steam store—an online games marketplace with an open submission process—and newly accessible game development engines prompted the creation of a new form in the games industry. You no longer needed a small army of artists, programmers, sales people, and big publishers to create and market a video game. Just a few multitaskers, or even a single developer, could pursue a smaller, particular vision, unburdened by the cravings of big publishers. 

“I went to college for illustration and I’d always been interested in games, but I didn’t think artists could make games,” Marlowe Dobbe, a Portland-based art director for Mega Crit, an independent games studio based in Seattle, told the Mercury. “Someone recommended I go to a PIGSquad event and that sort of opened the door to me… showed me I was interested in a lot of different kinds of game development.”

“Obviously the big difference with indie game-making is team size,” Dobbe said. “When you’re talking about making games in smaller teams you have to wear a lot more hats, learn how to do a lot of different things. I’ll draw the assets, I’ll be doing UI design sometimes, sometimes I do VFX (visual effects). You have to juggle a little bit. But you also get more creative freedom in whatever role you take on because you don’t have to respond to three or four managers. You see a lot more individual artistic expression. Indie games aren’t necessarily designed by committee, but by a small group of people who have a vision.” 

These burgeoning tools and markets created a new ethic, a DIY approach to games development with a wide spectrum of practitioners. Some of these games are huge. Dobby is deep in production on a sequel to Slay the Spire, a magnificent deckbuilding roguelike that sold three million copies on Steam alone. The most anticipated game of any pedigree released this year was Hallow Knight: Silksong, a metroidvania produced by a team of three people. Practically every gamer has probably played at least a little Stardew Valley, an ever-expanding farming simulator made by a single person that sold a whopping 41 million copies in total. But as with any art form, not everyone is that successful or ambitious. Some indie developers eke out an existence on the edges of the game development space, some are just hobbyists, grinding away at a personal project on their off-time, while others are developers or contractors for big developers, looking to merge out of that lane into something more personal.

At one time, games development was locked behind a wall of technical expertise and publishing barriers, but now, people make games for as many reasons as people make any kind of art.

“I think I hosted my 82nd game jam the other month,” Will Lewis, the director of PIGSquad, told the Mercury. Game jamming is a central practice in the DIY games scene, the game development equivalent of a jam session or a sewing circle. 

“It’s a pretty easy pitch,” Lewis said. “People come out, loosen up, have a good time, chat with each other. You form teams, declare you’ll be working as a solo developer, or form a team as you go. Then, you’re delivered a theme. You have to make an entire game between that time and whenever the game jam ends—a day, a weekend, or a week… depending on the scope of the jam. It can be anything. Any sort of experience.”

“Our goals are to finish something,” Lewis noted, “work with a new tool, a new person, creating an accessible space for people who have never jumped into a game jam before, something that sits at the cross-boundary of networking and education. Then, people go off to do amazing things. They spin off and do their own thing— maybe meeting someone at an event and making a game jam together, and then being like, ‘Oh I don’t know, let’s start a business together,’ and just going for it.”

One game jam game on display at the PIGSquad booth is The Forged Curse, by Cheree Andringa and Cameron Wiggers, a roguelike made with Pico-8, a small scale game platform that’s a common tool for small projects or rough drafts. 

“I learned HTML and CSS by playing Neopets in high school,” said Andringa, a web developer by trade. “I did all kinds of stupid stuff. You have shops and things, and you wanted to make it look nice, so you learned CSS to make it look less generic.”

“We had a vague interest in game development stuff,” Wiggers said, “and around 2018, when we saw PIGSquad was doing a jam, it was a good excuse to try it. It was exciting.”

“Exciting and difficult,” Andringa added.

“We struggled a lot. But we just kept going,” said Wiggers.

“We really did want to make games,” Andringa continued. “Games are something I’m very passionate about, I used to work at a video game store, I used to be a vendor here. It was a life goal kind of thing: ‘I want to make a game someday.’” 

“Those early jams, they were in-person events, and we were really inspired by that,” Wiggers remembered. “Seeing the cool stuff that people made, it was everything we wanted to be.”

“It’s hard and rewarding,” said Andringa. 

Is it harder than web development? Andringa answered quickly. 

“Yes. It has so many more systems in it. Games can be really broken. I think the way you interact with them is part of it. When you’re playing a video game, you put yourself into that space. So when something goes wrong it can be incredibly frustrating.”

“In some ways, when you’re making a game, you’re trying to build all the way around an experience,” Wiggers noted. “You’re saying, ‘This is what I want the player to have, and I need to build walls all the way around the entire thing…”

“…to keep them contained in that experience,”  Andringa added.

“Every part of that experience. It’s challenging,” said Wiggers. 

Another game on display at the PIGS booth is Checkmage!, an upcoming chess/puzzle/card-based adventure game by Austin Evans and Cedar, a pair of Vancouver, Washington-based developers. Checkmage! was a long time in the making, but accessible, very polished, and kind of ingenious in the playing—a shot downfield for big indie game success. 

“I used to have this board game I made,” said Evans. “I would take Monopoly, add a stack of cards with additional rules that I wrote. And every time you landed on the ‘chance’ space, I’d add that rule to the list of existing Monopoly rules.”

“It has like seven different versions now—printed out cards and everything,” Cedar said. He tells me that, at one point, one of the extra rules cards necessitated simultaneously playing a game of Jenga alongside Monopoly. 

“I made some game jam games that have similar building concepts, and Checkmage! is the same thing—except building on top of chess.”

Evans, a veteran game jammer whose computer science degree aspirations were scattered to the wind by an errant physics class, has been working on Checkmage! for two years now. Six months into the process, he drafted Cedar, his longtime friend who does more benign computer programming for a living. 

“I find systems very interesting,” Cedar said. “I love Checkmage! because there are so many emergent properties based on different things you can give to a different piece. Game development, for me, has the most correlation with what I look for in art. All kinds of visual stuff, music, good game sense, being able to make a character that’s good to play—the confluence of all these things. That’s what brings me to game development, instead of just writing or drawing.”

In the last 30 or so years, computers have come to absorb more of our everyday lives. The key to understanding how a computer works lives in the sort of thinking Cedar described here: the management of systems, controlling logistical flows, building something functional and elegant in the medium of a computer programming language. It’s a creative field, but it’s hard to see that, living in the world capitalism has built with it. Games development is an expressive form of these tools, of this eBay of thinking. Paint is just for houses until you add it to a canvas with the intent of extracting a feeling of inspiration from a viewer. Code is the same way. 

“Because of my career, I’m a lot more confident with my programming skills, and games give me a place where I can actually use that to make stuff I’m proud of, something expressive,” Cedar said. “Being able to translate an idea into code more effectively. I’ve played guitar—but there’s nothing that allows me to express myself like game development.”