Game Jam
Over the years, I have been part of my fair share of game jams. It is an event hosted by LiTHe Kod where the goal is to create a game in 48h hours. This encompasses both creating the ideas, programming, art, music, game design, and more. During the jams, I have mostly focused on the aspects of game design and programming, but have also contributed a bit of music here and there.
Egg Sandwich Adventures: DX. The Chronicles of the Caviar. Chapter II (yes, we
thought we were very funny coming up with that) is a simple horror adventure
where you play as an egg sandwich. Your goal is to venture off and find
dragon eggs to be able to grow bigger and stronger. The issue is that the eggs
are guarded by Bolibompadraken! They will try to fry the sandwich using their
fiery breath. But by throwing tomatoes and squirting caviar, the sandwich
is able to level out the playing field.
This was my first ever project in Godot, meaning
I spent most of my time trying to learn the engine. I immediately became over ambitious
and tried implementing the A* Path Finding Algorithm for the dragons.
After a whole day of work, I gave up and the dragons had to navigate using rays
instead. Bolibompadraken was just meant to be a placeholder by the way,
but in the end, we thought they were too funny to remove. I also implemented
the tomato spawning system and made the dragons shoot fire.
Minnesota Bones is an evil puzzle platformer where you play as the undead
adventurer
Minnesota Bones. For an age, Minnesota were sleeping down in their crypt while
their servers mined crypto currency for them. To their horror, they were corpse-napped
away in their sleep by greedy archeologists (the British museum?). They now have to return
to fetch their crypto wallet, while something evil lurks in the deep.
The theme for this game jam was duality. It spawned the idea of a
platformer where you have to first solve puzzles that sets you up for your return.
It is easy to get down to the crypto wallet, but if you don't think carefully
about your path, you might not be able to get back. The idea was fun in theory,
but our game design was outright bad. We thought it was way too funny to not
give the player hints about the fact that they had to return. We also tried
actively tricking and trapping players with the puzzles.
Finally, it was also way too hard overall, and with no checkpoints,
players just got frustrated. Lesson learned: Fun for the developers doesn't
necessarily translate into fun for the players.
Återvänd till Apa is a sudden death action shooter where you play as monkeys, running around in a tree, shooting each other with bananas. It was our first multiplayer game, which makes it fun by definition! I won't get in to too much detail since I wasn't very involved with this game. However, the funniest part about it was by far the monkey space program. One of the features was that the monkeys could climb on the roofs and walls of the tree. One side effect of this was that they could also climb on each other! If two players timed it well and started climbing on each other at the same time, they could travel indefinitely into the air. We added a moon far above the level just for this purpose as a fun easter egg.
Conjuring Carpentry is a survival tower defence game where you play as a
carpenter with magical powers. In the daytime, you wander around the woods,
chopping down trees and crafting beautiful furniture. At night, your creations
come alive to defend you against the horrors of the forest.
I still think the original idea was great, but it was far too ambitious for
a game jam. Since we barely had time to playtest, the furniture and the waves
of enemies were very unbalanced. One of the furniture even crashes all enemies
on the whole map (we still have no idea how that happened). I spent most of my time working
on the enemy AI and the wave spawning mechanism. On a positive note, I finally managed to get
A* path finding working in Godot!
Rootwork is a game where you grow roots. That's pretty much it. You put down
your seeds, the roots grow and you collect more seeds. It is barely a game,
but it is actually very relaxing to look at. I only wish we would've added music
to it.
It is by far the most simple game we've made thus far, which was intentional since our
studies were very hectic at the time. I spent the first evening of the jam
programming the root algorithm. Each root cell essentially checks its
surroundings for other roots, and tries to grow in the opposite direction,
which some randomness thrown in. After the catastrophe called Conjuring Carpentry,
making a simple game was quite nice and it turned out great, mostly because it was so simple.
To be written.
To be written.
To be written.
Watch out for the goat. Making procedurally generated mazes is fun.
One and the Same
To be written