RVA Game Jams continues to be a source of inspiration and creative energy in my game audio journey. I have written endlessly on this site about the past projects I have done for this amazing group of game devs. One common feature of these projects is that the jams have all taken place within the city of Richmond. This past weekend, during Cabin Jam, RVA Game Jams took game dev outside of the city!
Cabin Jam was a fun and rewarding experience that really tested my game dev experience in ways I couldn’t have imagined. In this post, I will be talking all about it!
RVA Game Jams: On The Beach
I should probably first explain what a Cabin Jam is.
Cabin Jam is a semi-annual game jam hosted by RVA Game Jams, where they take a group of game devs, rent out a place to stay in Virginia, and make a game under one roof! Last time RVA Game Jams hosted Cabin Jam, they stayed in a place near a cave. This year, we headed out to Montross, Virginia, and made home base on the shoreline of the Potomac River!
As you can see by this photo, we stayed at an insane “cabin”! This place was roughly 3 stories tall, has a crow’s nest, and even comes with an elevator to reach all the floors! There’s even a sandy beach outside (which I heard is artificial), which makes this place feel more like a beach destination rather than a river destination. We ended up having roughly 20 game devs here at this “cabin”.
After the initial shock and awe ran its course for this beautiful place, it was time to get started and jam! In this next section, I’ll talk about the jam, the games I made, and the challenges I had.
Cabin Jam 2026 Theme
After a group dinner and making sure everyone arrived, the theme for Cabin Jam was dropped. The theme for this year’s Cabin Jam was “Trail” with 2 additional modifiers:
- Include a crab
- Incorporate the theme for Ludum Dare 59: Signal
After getting our assignment, I went straight to my team. My team included programmer Andrew (who worked with me on Office Cat), programmer Dylan (who worked with me on Swap Drop), and artist Ella. Immediately, we had decided to go for something strange and unusual. This was because Andrew wanted to try to do something different, as he’s known for making lighthearted and playful games. After a couple of hours of ideation, we decided to make a game about talking to strange people on the side of the road you are traveling down. I really had no objections to this idea, because I’m a big fan of horror-related things.
In these posts, I usually talk about how I made the sounds and music. I won’t be going over that in this post. The issues I faced were less technical in regard to the sound making process. Let’s talk about the main challenges I faced.
Working During the Jam
The main technical hurdle I faced was all hardware-related. I personally don’t own any modern laptop; except for a 2014 Alienware-based gaming laptop. This laptop really served me well in college for my music making, but it’s really showing its age. I ended up bringing my laptop to Cabin Jam, and the solution to getting past the hardware limitations was to use Parsec to remote into my desktop PC.
This solved the main issue, and some smaller issues I didn’t know about, but there was still one missing piece to solve my music-making workflow problem. The remote setup I described would be all you really need to get started making music, if you wanted to use your typing keyboard and mouse. I am the kind of person who vastly prefers to make music with a musical keyboard. So the missing piece was figuring out how to send MIDI data from my laptop to my desktop PC. The solution to this was a piece of software called VirtualHere. This software was installed on both PCs and it allows USB devices to connect to another PC over the network. To make all of this work outside of my home network, I glued everything together with TailScale.
It was a hacked-up solution, but I was able to make music this way during Cabin Jam. This is not an ideal setup that I would want to use all the time, especially the lag that comes with this setup, but it got the job done. It’s pretty much the music equivalent of “roughing it” in a cabin! Here’s a picture of my setup sprawled on a dining room table.
Non Technical Challenges
I thought these hardware challenges were going to be the only challenge I faced during this Cabin Jam. What I did not anticipate was the challenges that came with all of us being under one roof for roughly 48 hours. The first part of that is just the location we were at. I mean, look at this:
We stayed at a very gorgeous beach location. The first challenge was finding the motivation to stay on my computer screen and not spend every second relaxing on the beach!
The second challenge was being with 20 other game devs for 24 hours. I did get work done in the end, but in between work, there were random shenanigans happening in the cabin. Things like people hanging out in the hot tub, going out to kayak, and smaller things like that. I really didn’t want to miss out on making connections with people. It felt like being in college dorms again.
The distractions are a big negative to working under one roof, but it is also positive in some aspects. Being with other people who do similar stuff as you enables you to trade knowledge and learn something new. It was really rewarding to talk shop with other folks and participate in the sharing of knowledge.
The other positive aspect was being able to work on another project! I had my main game and team, but my friend Tyler asked me to assist him on his game! It was kinda funny too, because while we were mingling in the cabin, he came up to me and the conversation pretty much went like this:
“Hey Alex, can you make some sounds for my game?”
“Sure Tyler, What kind of music are you looking for?”
“I just need some random sounds”
“…”
I was able to work on a really fun project as a result of that. The game Tyler made was a game where you draw your own lines and drop balls onto these lines. As the balls rolled down your line, the music that played depended on the color of the lines you used and the speed of the ball. Basically, the pitch of the music would change depending on the speed of the ball.
So while there are some downsides to being all in the same place, it was also a great benefit to have a collaborative environment. As I’m writing this, I think back to the arguments of office workers going back to the office after working remotely during the pandemic. While I strongly support a worker’s right to work remotely, doing Cabin Jam made me consider the “return to the office” argument more than I realized. I don’t think there will be a clear-cut “correct” way of doing things, but I really did enjoy being in the same environment for a short time.
Game Showcase
With all of these challenges, and all of its positives and negatives, I was able to get all of my projects done. Our team not only had a great time seeing the other projects during our showcase, but we also had a lot of fun showcasing our game!
Before I share links to the projects I completed during Cabin Jam, I want to thank RVA Game Jams for this opportunity. It was such a rewarding experience to make games, have community dinners, play board games, talk shop, and a whole list of other stuff I was able to do. I truly cannot express the gratitude I have for RVA Game Jams and the continued camaraderie and creative energy it gives me. Thank you so much!
I also want to thank Andrew, Dylan, Ella, and Tyler for being wonderful collaborators!
You can play Just Keep Driving here
You can play Trail Signal here
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