have a super-defined method for balancing my
time other than I have a ton of work to do at the
studio, and I put a lot of my free time into my
other side projects,” he says. “For me, making
is breathing, so it’s hard to stop.”
HOBBY TO CAREER
In Arvi Teikari’s case, game jams haven’t just been
one stop on the road, but rather a continual
creative exercise from the beginning of his career.
After attending jams for over a decade, Teikari
won Nordic Game Jam in 2017 with Baba Is You,
a unique puzzler where moving blocks changes
the game’s fundamental mechanics. Around
the time Teikari made the game, he still viewed
full-time development as somewhat unattainable.
“Back when I was making games as a hobby,” he
says, “the concept of making them commercially
was one of those abstract distant-future goals to
dream about, kind of like being mentioned on a
bigger website or winning a game-development
competition. At first, I didn’t really even strive
towards making game development my job
because I was afraid of the uncertainty of earning
my living via making games, as well as the
potential of it becoming a chore due to no longer
being something I do just for fun.”
As well as getting a chance to make prototypes
of his ideas, Teikari primarily saw game jams as a
chance to meet people and grow as an individual.
“Physical jams, such as No More Sweden, were
a way for me to visit completely different social
environments and get accustomed to travelling
on my own, so the social interaction and meeting
indie developer friends was and has been the
main draw with them.”
It was the people Teikari met at jams that
encouraged him to release Baba Is You as a full
game – a process he was initially anxious about.
“When making a game for a jam, I generally
acknowledge that what I’m doing won’t be
extendable into a full game as is,” Teikari explains.
“The code/art/audio will be rushed and hacky, and
large parts of the game will have to be redone
from scratch to be more dynamic and nicer to
work with. There was a period of time right after
the jam where I was somewhat anxious about
how I would need to ‘upgrade’ the game in order
to make it more appealing or marketable.”
As you’ll know from reading Wireframe’s review
of Baba Is You in issue 10, though, Teikari really
had nothing to worry about – it’s easily one of the
best indie puzzlers we played in 2019. But even
after all the critical success, Teikari’s cautious
nature hasn’t left him, he says. “At this point,
it’d seem that releasing an indie game that’s
successful enough to permit working full-time on
another commercial indie title is tough enough
that managing to do it ought to be described as
a career success. By this metric, I’d say that I’m
successful at the moment – but I’m not sure if I
believe I’ll be successful in the future.”REAL-WORLD SUCCESS
Teikari may be right to be cautious about the
precarious nature of success in the games
industry, but there’s no denying that the
developers we’ve spoken to have been able to
forge interesting careers out of their time at jams.
Teikari is rare in being able to financially depend
on these however, as developers like those at
Space Backyard still take on outside projects to
supplement the time they spend making games.
Yet, if you measure success in the output of
creative and innovative games, these developers
are overflowing with it. The jam experience has
been formative for each of them, not only for the
connections and bonds formed, but the work
ethic it helps instil – an ethic that has kept these
small studios growing and evolving ever since.PROC
AND ROLL
PROCJAM is relatively relaxed
in comparison to other jams.
Originally founded in 2017, the
online jam allows developers
ten days to work on projects.
They can be related to that
year’s theme or not at all – as
long as developers make a
game that ‘makes something’,
they can enter.PROC
AND ROLL Pattern’s procedurally generated
world resets after you sleep at
the camp-fire, meaning your
only real objective is to get back
to sleep. Relatable. Game jams: a quietly
frantic hive of creativity.It started with a game jamInterface
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