Game Jams
I've taken part in game jams for many years now. It started out as something I would do to get more experience making games but its now just a genuinely fun past-time I fall into every few months. When I was at University I worked within its Computing Society to run them very regularly and they were always lovely. For a few years I was also in a game-jam team who took part in Ludum-Dare regularly.
This is a brief overview of the various games I have made over the years.
Rummaging Raccoon - Godot
A small game about a raccoon re-greening a scrap yard. This was the first Ludum-Dare game-jam I took part in with my jam-team and I immediately started asking if we could do games relating to nature 😅.
I set up the menu and character movement/actions. I also designed the main character!
Tunnel Tunnel - Python
I ran a number of "ascii-only" game jams at uni, the aim being to provide accessible game jams to students who had very little coding experience and wouldnt be able to use OOP based game engines yet. This became a yearly thing for us, turns out there's a really fun challenge to the minimalist aspects of ascii and you can take it as far or as simple as you want.
My first proper entry to this was "tunnel tunnel", a game about a character tunneling a tunnel. You're presented with a dark and hidden path and you have to predict what will be down the next step in the tunnel before you take it. This starts off impossible but emerging patterns appear.
I was really proud of my implementation of this game, it was modular enough that I was able to make a fully interactable tutorial in half an hour just using pre-existing modules from the actual game.
Retrieve Them - Godot
A very unfinished game. I was really attached to the idea behind this game but the friend I was working with lost drive and dropped out after a day :/
You play as a robot whos job is to collect the bodies of climbers who died climbing an un-named and infinite mountain. You take find them and take them home to your graveyard to give them a proper burial.
Gameplay wise, it was a 3d game where you had 4 different robot arms: Picks for movement, a grabber for collecting people, a harpoon for traversing larger gaps and a heater which you would periodically run over other arms to stop them freezing up. One arm could be controlled at a time and would follow the mouse, the idea was to be kind of difficult to control and have a lot of pressures from the harsh environment.
This game didn't end up with any working code but it was one of the few recent game-jams I've done which used blender, so I want to put some images up from there and also share a video of the menu I made, which I think was really cute.
Evolution - Godot
The first game-jam I ever took part in, this was a game made with a few friends, including a musician who made music for it!! The theme was evolution so we decided to greate a roguelike dungeon crawler where you went through the same location on repeat but slept for thousands of years between. The game limited your ammo and damage but made you very fast, so it forced you to leave some enemies alive each round. Between rounds, when you were asleep, evolution would occur in the enemies you left behind. If you let enemies that you struggled to fight live, your game would get harder, but if instead you chose to control the evolution and left the weaker enemies live, you'd have an easier time.
Enemies had 5 or so traits which controlled their damage, speed and behaviours, these would be collected and altered whenever you slept. You'd be given random traits at the start too, so that different enemy traits benefitted you different runs.
We didnt finish the game but we got a single enemy working with a few traits, player movement and rooms that randomly altered somewhat between sleeps whilst still being similar enough to feasibly be the same room.
See the code here
See our planning document here
Decay - Java
A game made for the theme "Decay" with a friend in Java. I dont have a Java toolchain set up anymore so I cant get screenshots of this game.
The premise was to create yahtzee but the dice decay. You'd play a round and depending on how well you did, you'd see spots pop off and fall from the dice. Dice would be more or less likely to lose dots depending on your use of them, so you'd have to balance your dice choices out. We also had a shop where you could buy various powerups to help lessen the decay.
I'm really proud of the code for this game, it was made between two people and we structured it really well to make this as easy as possible.
FungalCreep - Python
Another ascii game made between a few friends under the theme "Infestation". This is a hard game to describe, its a blend of Othello and Battleships. You would place "infectious" counters on your enemys board or "blocking counters" on your board. Infection counters would slowly spread and infect other tiles, blocking counters would allow you to remove infectious counters using Othello rules.
