Week 5: Global Game Jam 2025 and Spring Festival in Tallinn

GGJ 2025

This week I finished the Global Game Jam I have long prepared. Sadly, I got nothing. But on the good side. I finished all the things I planned.

Before we start building. We made a game concept meeting. In this meeting, I use the concept form I found in Unity pathways. Because the time was limited, we didn’t have time make a paper prototype. We directly started to build the game the other day. I made the backlog at that night, and we follow the backlog as planned. We finally made a game idea on a crypto guy raising a MeMe Coin base on lying on the news.

The result, from my view. The game mechanism is good. But the game UI is textural, meaning choosing a web based engine should be better than unity, the one we chose.

So, retrospect the whole project. I think the problem is from the concept meeting. We made the game too complex. This is my first time to use the game concept form. When I realized the game mechanism is too complex, I tried to argue about it but I got persuaded. The other problem, In this team, there are 2 programmers, 2 graphic designers and 1 guy with no experience. Eventually, only 2 programmer and 1 designer is fully working. The other designer has to work with the guy with no experience for narratives. However, narrative is not too important to use 2 guys working on it. Actually, the no-experience guy can do video editing, but when I found out it was too late.

In conclusion, the next time,:

• I will add a rule to the game concept form. Only one/zero object can be interacted with. Any other ideas should be back for finishing the game. After the game version one is finished, we then talk about optimization and adding more features.
• Consider video elements in some game, if a guy has totally no experience, he can be able to do that. And do not let that guy do management work.
• Backlog should be a group work. The first day, even the paper prototype is not finished, the backlog should be finished.
• And we didn’t let other people to try the game.

Deep Seek

Deep Seek beats ChatGPT, this week. I built a local model with Ollama on my PC. I like the deep thinking part in this model. I then tried Janus a local graphic model that is also from deep seek. A 7B model runs 10 minutes on my PC to make an image.

Spring Festival in Tallinn

The Chinese group is super small in Estonia. But there is still a celebration in Tallinn. It is hold in Viru Keskus. Two lion players with no background music. I had some Chinese food and then watched the show. After the show I tried the lion costume. And new year is done.