Made for Norwich Games Festival Jam 2024 with the theme “beyond the stars”.
Unfortunately, I failed to complete this within the jam timeframe, but I’ve achieved enough with it that I hope to take it forward as a side project.
It’s planned to be a Metroidvania of sorts, or a “Microvania,” as I called it during ideation. Your ship, “The Magdalen,” has crash-landed on a nearby planet, and you must search the environment for parts to repair it. Bring those parts back to the ship, radio your friends, and make your way back home!
A full retrospective will be written once I release it with the scope intended for the jam.
]]>A throwback 3D platforming project with elements inspired by the classics.
Made in 16 weeks as a major project on Mastered’s real-time 3D skills bootcamp.
A 3D car configurator set in a post-apocalyptic environment.
Made as a qualifier project for Mastered’s real-time 3D skills bootcamp.
]]>Made for Ludum Dare 50 with the theme “delay the inevitable”.
Unlike other jams I've participated in, LD's community voting rounds meant that I had an idea for what the theme might be ahead of time. I was able to generate a bunch of ideas on many sheets of A4 the night prior. The first of those ideas is what I took forward into the jam.
With the theme “delay the inevitable”, I settled on the idea that humanity will inevitably become a multiplanetary species and that you would be in control of an alien device trying to prevent it. Shuttles would spawn at random intervals from Earth and head in the direction of neighbouring planets. The player would be facing Earth and only able to move within a certain range of it's orbit.
I had a few things to learn in order to make my idea work. These aspects at least went well.
It's been nine months since I last attempted a game jam so I've definitely had to remind myself of the standard practices.
I happened upon the 4:44 rule whilst testing other's submissions, and I think I’ll apply it when the next game jam opportunity rolls around.
]]>Made for One Hour Game Jam with the theme “Virtual Pet”.
It’s a “clean-em-up”.
Cyber pets require you to periodically clean the screen. So this is what came to mind when the theme was announced.
To play you simply need to collide with the poops that spawn.
It was my second time participating in this jam.
When comparing this to the last submission, you can see my one hour prototyping ability has improved.
The game features a little narrative, a little more gameplay and two possible outcomes. I’m pleased with it given the time limit. It got a laugh on the Twitch stream too!
]]>Made for One Hour Game Jam with the theme “Clouds”.
Given that development time is so limited, you really have to go with the first thing that comes to mind. With “clouds” in mind, it was a childhood memory. As a child I would often hang on to climbing frame rails, look into the sky and fear falling into it.
So in the game you’re hanging on to a rail and coins spawn along it. You must move left/right to collect the coins before they disappear. If you don’t, you’ll fall in!
I’ve been aware of One Hour Game Jam for a few years, but only recently have I felt the confidence to try it.
Despite it actually taking me 1 hour and 15 minutes to design, build and publish, I’m happy with the result. I published the Windows build on Itch in time for the Twitch stream. I then spent a few minutes post-stream tidying up the descriptions and shipping a WebGL build.
Every decision you make during One Hour Game Jam has a measurable impact. Hit play too many times for example…and you’re eating precious time. The editor crashed? Well that mistake cost you a few more minutes. In my case, the worst slowdown was a prefab instancing bug which took 10-15 minutes to figure out and resolve.
The challenge has helped me to gain a sense of both where I’m at and what I’m actually capable of given a short time limit. Another positive outcome is that I feel more ready to take on jams that happen over a weekend like Ludum Dare. Pretty much anything on offer at the game jam databases now feels within reach.
]]>Made in two weeks for VaporJam.
The theme was open-ended: “make a vaporwave-themed game”. With the ongoing lockdown in England, I've been feeling nostalgic of better times. I decided that for this game it would be fun to centre a game around a particularly nostalgic period of my life.
While musing on the theme, I was re-watching some George Carlin specials. His “Shopping and Eating” routine for some reason sat at the forefront of my mind. So I decided that this would be a super-chill exploration of the late 90's through the lens of a shopping mall.
The idea requires me to recall details of particular things I was exploring or doing at the time. As I age, I'm noticing that these things are becoming more like vague recollections. In some circumstances, I have to correct myself. So there's an aspect to the game where a voice breaks in to correct or provide more context.
You are to populate your inventory with one of each type of item at the mall. A game, a music cd, a film and so on. Some memories are accurate, some have been misrecalled and are of things I encountered later in life.
It's a strange one, but I hope it makes sense and triggers some nostalgic feelings.
This one really suffered from scope creep.
With each jam, I've aimed to learn at least one new thing. With this one however, there were too many of those things.
For future jams, I'll make sure to limit it to one significant new thing each time.
]]>Made for Weekly Game Jam 206.
I decided stealth would be an interesting genre to explore this week. I asked myself: “What if stealth but you can freeze stuff?”. What resulted is a game that echoes elements of top-down RPGs, stealth games and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In this game, you've performed an infiltration and are about to take the prototype clock. You must now escape, using the clock to freeze time and sneak past obstacles.
I learned a few new things, such as how to make music persist across gameplay scenes. I've learned some cool ways to use the space around my 1:1 box frame, so this week's game is widescreen! I'm getting better at managing DontDestroyOnLoad() these days too.
On the final day, I learned to make good use of the Unity-provided shape primitives. I know it saved me a ton of time. Each of the objects the player interacts with are composed of them. They seem to work well with my basic style too. Will definitely be using those again in future jams.
Lag from the last week's entry slowed me down this week. That, and I definitely over-scoped again.
I spent too long on silly technology like the door transitions. I later realised that one big scene with clever camera direction would've worked. I made a whole inventory backend for one item too, which could've been a flag on the player.
Despite these issues. I can celebrate delivering it within the deadline.
Made for Weekly Game Jam 205.
The jam theme was “unconventional superpowers”.
It's a platformer with a light amount of physics-based challenge. Your unconventional superpower is that you are statically charged. As such, you can either attract or repel crates. It's in the repelling of crates that you can make projectiles of them. This allows you to progress through levels and defeat exit-blocking enemies. You can also move crates for leverage to higher places etc.
I learned a ton this week too. Particularly I've gotten a good handle on Unity's animation system now.
The object attraction and repelling physics are far from perfect. They're good enough for a first attempt at anything like this though. If I get the opportunity to, then this game is for-sure a candidate for later expansion.
What didn't go wrong this week? It started with a bad design idea which I mused on for several days. I abandoned it Monday morning and later began work on Charged the same day. I thus lost several days effort.
I also felt like I spent too much time in the “sandbox phase”. It's a scene which contains one or two of every prefab and their intended behaviours. I spent 80%-90% percent of the time there and the remaining 10% on actual level design. Everything seemed to fall into place once the prefabs were working as intended in the sandbox.
Unfortunately I ended up submitting this game late. Still a game made within a week, but short of the jam deadline.
Made for Weekly Game Jam 204.
The jam theme was “downhill”.
I juggled several ideas this week, but crypto’s volatility kept repeating on me. I had observed the events that lead up to the most recent dip. The memes and discussion threads that followed too. So I thought that for this week it would be fun to explore and communicate aspects of it.
I learned a ton this week and I hope it shows in the presentation and interactivity.
One of the criticisms I received last week was that the game was too short. So this week, I’ve explored a game with several endings.
When the jam wrapped up, I had enough time between to be able to go back and fix up issues in the previous week's project.
I wasted a LOT of time trying to figure out how to render a line graph. If I had asked somebody in Discord, then I could’ve saved myself the better part of a day. In the end, I cut the feature.
I also spent much too long trying to figure out how to make sprites respond to click events. No amount of prior CSS z-index knowledge helped. Several wasted hours later, I realised that I could’ve used Unity’s built-in UI buttons. So I implemented those instead.
When you’re stuck on a problem for more than 15 minutes, ask somebody.
]]>Made for Weekly Game Jam 203.
The jam theme was “Eat the Enemy”.
I like to explore antagonists and the anti-hero archetype. After some thought, I settled on the idea that the player would be the bad guy and that they would be eating the good guy.
I spent too long musing on features and aesthetic decisions. Most of the code went in on the final days. Particularly in the final few hours where I had to cut back and focus on quick-wins.
For example, I decided to cut back on how I represent a horde of ghouls. The plan was to present the ghoul with child ghouls following in a grid-like formation. I instead opted for displaying the number and scaling the player.
Despite it's flaws, the product has a beginning, a middle and an end. It shipped within the deadline. As one of the comments read, that’s an achievement in and of itself.
I received plenty of well-meaning feedback and feature requests.
Rad Rocket was my first attempt at making, marketing and releasing a game.
It was built using GameMaker Studio 2 in a month.
It’s a brief, but satisfying run.
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