Green Opal

I've been going to fosdem most years since 2022. On my first year there I made some friends who I joined in a game development team.

The group was called Green-Opal Studio, (we got this neat little website here). They took part in regular Ludum Dare game jams, two of which I took part in. The team hoped to make a full game at some point however, so we fell into having monthly meetings and slowly building up a game in our spare time.

Toad Towers 2

The main focus was on a small game titled Toad Towers 2 (based on a smaller game-jam game made previously). It was a deck-builder game where you play as a frog architect building sky-scrapers. Cards would represent rooms in a building and you would place different rooms near each other to achieve specific synergies between them. At the end of a round, the building would have to meet the requirements of a client and also sometimes be tested by a natural disaster or two.

Toad Towers 2 was developed for about 2 years, I produced card designs and worked on creating generic UI elements which could be implemented throughout the game. The team collectively worked on game design, having multi-hour meetings discussing cards and how different mechanics would interact. Some of my favourite moments came from discussing the little in-jokes and lore we wanted to hide in it.

Game development on Toad Towers slowed after two or so years and we decided that we'd stopped enjoying the work sadly.

We decided to instead try create a much smaller game through a set of game-jam style 3 day events spread across the year.

Project Wanderer

Project Wanderer was our second attempt at producing a full game outside of a game-jam. It was set in a possibly post-apocalyptic world with a nomadic culture where people travelled and lived in tents, permanently living a camping-type lifestyle.

Players would have a notebook they aimed to fill with information about the world and would have to travel around meeting strangers and collecting information and their stories from them. Survival was an aspect to the game but the main point was to enjoy the outdoors.

My main addition to this game was the open world movement system. I created a character the player could control alongside an open space and a number of intractable assets which the world would be populated with.

A big mechanic I really loved was the maps mechanic made by our team-mate Momo. Instead of having a single map, the player would collect fragments of different maps and different scales with different levels of reliability and detail. They could see where they were on each map but had to move them over each other and organise them to slowly gather where things were relative to them.

As my final year of uni progressed, I found my drive for the project slowed so I left the group fully to focus on other things. I hope to see them next year at FOSDEM though, I still consider them good friends.

Our Ludum Dare Games

Rummaging Raccoon

As well as this, the group took part in the Ludum Dare game-jams pretty regularly. In the first one I joined for, we made a game about a raccoon re-greening a scrap yard and building robots out of junk. It had hand-painted sprites, an adaptive sound track that changed as the scrap yard got cleaner and some really neat little animations that I set up.

I created the movement system, the planting and grabbing mechanics and designed/implemented assets and animations for the UI.

This video shows some of its game-play nearing the end of the jam, a few bug fixes were made a bit later on too.

Paws On Potions

My second game for Ludum Dare. In this game you played as a potion selling cat, foraging for potion ingredients and learning how they combined to produce different effects.

I produced a mini game for the player to collect items and did the UI design for the main characters "nekonomicon".

Thanks :)

I've found I got a lot out of working with this group, they're great friends and I really enjoyed making games with them as a break on-and-off from other work.