Train Jam
What is Train Jam?
Train Jam is a 52-hour game jam on a train from Chicago to San Francisco.
150+ game developers and artists get on the train and are split up into small teams of 3-5 people. You have 52 hours to make a game around the given theme before you get to SF. The week after you arrive in SF is the Game Developers Conference where we’re given space to show off the game that we made.
Constraints
Train Jam has some very unique constraints that force you to exercise certain things that are normally foreign while programming.
For example, there’s no internet. So when faced with a problem, you can’t just Google it and read through solutions. You’re forced to reach out to the people around you.
Grabbing another programmer or designer and talking out issues right at your machine and problem-solving something on the fly was some of my favorite things about Train Jam. You get to learn how someone else thinks out a problem as you collaborate to make something that’s fun to play.
Snakes on a Train
The theme for the game jam was “Max Capacity.” So we decided to make a bunch of twists on the classic arcade game Snake and jam as many modes into it as possible — aptly titled “Snakes on a Train.”
The game is two players. You eat pellets to make the other person’s snake grow and get faster — making it more difficult for them to stay alive. If you hit a wall or the other snake, you die and the game is over. Each round is 15 seconds. If you survive the round you move on to the next round, but you maintain the length of your snake from the previous round to make it more difficult as the game goes on.
One of my favorite parts about Snakes on a Train is that we didn’t use any collisions through Unity. We built everything on top of a grid and used tiles to keep track of the walls and snakes.
A huge advantage to the grid layout was being able to build a “level loader” by reading the color values out of a texture. Black pixels are for the walls, a red pixel is for Player 1’s snake spawn, a blue pixel is for Player 2’s snake spawn, and green pixels are for the pellet spawns. This made level building very easy and allowed us to iterate on design rapidly.
