Cyber Path was a simple idea we had to try and make a game with a fun dash mechanic and an interesting upgrade path. While very simple I feel during the game jam we were able to accomplish these to things and we had a lot of fun with the dash and balancing the two upgrade paths was interesting to think about in the time frame of a 48 hour game jam.
For the 2021 game jam i created a small game about saving people have a disaster where a city has flooded. You have found a relatively safe island and must go out in your boat to collect both people and resources and bring them back to your dock.
A large amount of this jam for me was spent creating the water effects as i wanted to try my hand at unity’s shader graph.
You can take a look at the jam page and play the game here:
For Global Game Jam 2023 I ran a game jam site for the my company which involved first me pitching the idea to management then coordinating with the jam organising. I found running a jam site super interesting and very fun and rewarding
The game my team made was Sow In Debt, a simple arcady farming game where you had to plant crops and pull weeds before they damage those crops. there was a shop mechanic where you could sell your crops and buy more seeds and the goal was to keep your farm afloat for as long as you could.
As with all games made in 48 hours its a little rough around the edges but im very happy with what me and the team were able to accomplish and we focused a lot on game feel which i think shines through. I’m especially impressed with the end result considering i had to spend a lot of the jam organising the jam site as well and making sure everyone was doing alight.
You can take a look at the jam page and play the game here:
The pouring of the beer works by holding down a game pad’s trigger and you will pour a beer into a cup, if you release the trigger you drop the bear. You can hold two beers at once, one in each hand, which corresponds directly to your left and right trigger.
Robust Settings System
All the settings and game values are controlled through a settings system accessed in unity’s inspector, this allowed for all the games elements to be easily tweaked and controlled. This was everything from goblin spawn rate to beer pour time, right down to the points gained for different actions. This was done so during the game jam anyone on the team could change game elements if they wanted and didn’t need me to directly change the code, saving us a lot of time.
Procedural Goblins
To add a bit of variety in stead of just creating a few different goblins I asked the artist for several goblin parts per body art that were interchangeable. This meant that i could create a system that would spawn a goblin made up of different random parts that also had their colour randomly selected from a defined range of hues that would be appropriate to the type of body part or item of clothing.
About
At the 2019 Global game jam i went in as a team of three, one programmer, one artist and one sound engineer. We decided we wanted to make a small single mechanic game for the game jam to try and actually get everything we wanted done within the 48 hours we had. We landed on a game about a retired wizard running a pub for goblins, initially we wanted for there to be more involved in running the pub but we decided to stick to just serving them beer to keep the game simple. How the game works is a goblin comes in and ask for a certain type of beer that is colour coded, you then need to pour the beer from the correct barrel with either your left or right trigger and bring the beer to the goblins table. you can hold two beers at once independently pouring with your left and right triggers, if you let go of the trigger while holding a beer in the corresponding hand you will drop the beer. you need to break even my the end of the day and you lose the game if you run out of money. this simple mechanic and lose state ended up being both a lot of fun to make and play and was one of the most successful game jams i’ve been a part of.
Most of the game is procedurally generated. The placement of the stations as well as the train lines are completely random so the game is different each time you play. It also randomly names the stations from a list of station names that is loaded in from a text file.
Splines
To connect up the the stations after they are generated I created a spline system to act as the tracks that the trains could follow.
About
Trains mission was my submission to the Grads in Games Competition “Search for a Star”. The game started out as a game jam game created at the 2018 Global Game Jam. make this game was a great experience and I really liked the game idea so me and the artist(Molly McCarthy) who also worked on it kept developing it after the jam. It soon became better then what the search for a star game I had been working on so I kept working on and it became my search for a star game. The game consists of a procedurally generated subway system that the player has to make their way through to a certain station. After search for a star me and the artist have continued to improve and polish it with the intention of possibly releasing it fully on Itch once its good enough.
