Though working on the hotly anticipated Super Time Force (winner of the XBLA Prize at the IGF Awards last year, guaranteeing a first-party publishing deal through Microsoft) as well as at least one unannounced project, Capy Games – the studio behind Critter Crunch and Sword and Sworcery – threw their third annual Capyjam this February, and we talked to Capy’s co-founder and president Nathan Vella about the week-long game jam and the place of game jams in today’s industry.
What’s Capyjam’s backstory?
Three years ago we started to get to know a bunch of other independent developers and some of us had been going to TO Jam, and we kind of felt that one of the biggest hurdles when you’re making games is you work on one game for a long time. It becomes more about crossing tasks off a bug list or completing feature requests than feeling like you’re making something. So the last two years we took the last week before Christmas and said, “ok, everyone get together, find an artist, one or two programmers, maybe a designer and make something.”
Really it’s about everyone taking a chance to step away from work and make shit. Put stuff on screen quickly. As we’ve started to control our own projects, Capyjam is more and more about throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. Putting a controller or a touch screen in people’s hands and seeing if the idea is actually good rather than elaborately planning massive features that don’t even work.
The biggest idea behind Capyjam is “let’s remember what making games is all about.” I think that that translates directly into the games we’re making since we started doing it, people have been having cooler ideas, people are rapid prototyping; that’s kind of what we are all about now.
Super Time Force began at TO Jam. How did you come to commit to turning a jam game into a final product?
The timing was right, or rather we made the timing right. We pushed forward on it as a “Friday game” for, like, eight months. We only worked on it on Fridays and I think there was a total of two months work done in eight months, if not less than that. We knew the original jam team, Ken [Yeung] Mike [Nguyen] and Vic [Nguyen] were self-sufficient and capable.
Most importantly the game they made in the original three day jam, you were just like “holy shit.” We all picked it up, played it, got it, and thought “people are going to enjoy the shit out of this.” We could tell that everyone in the studio was super into it right off the bat so that’s why we made time for it.
Do you see that happening to Capyjam games?
There are tons of games that come out of Capyjam that could fall into those same scenarios. Part of the reason we do it is we’ve now had a taste of the fact you can have a pet project and that pet project can become something bigger. That’s something we want to foster at the studio. We are always going to want our “big” project or two, but having these smaller projects that come from inside the studio rather than the Capy founders saying “this is the next game we’re making” all the time. Time Force is proof of the pudding, and we want people to keep working on their Capyjam games if it interests them even if it’s not the “next Capy game.
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