Global Game Jam
As the time for the next jam approaches, I wanted to share a few thoughts from my previous experiences at game jams. I attended university in September 2018 (and stayed on until 2025) and one of the biggest events we had each year was the Global Game Jam, where you get a theme, and 48 hours to make a game. Here are my thoughts and experiences for each of the jams that I've attended.
2020: Repair
My first game jam experience was creating a small prototype of a game in RPG Maker. I'd bought the engine a while ago and it captivated my interest in game development as a whole. With the theme of "repair", I decided to go for a 'save the world' trope in which the colour had been taken from the world and you just had to collect it - keeping the scale small and the game short.
One of the biggest inspirations that I drew from was Drawn to Life. The Nintendo DS Lite was the first handheld I had grown up with and this game was one of the ones I started with. (Maybe I'll do a future blog about this and my thoughts on it.)
I'm currently working on an improved version of the game with a bigger storyline and more mechanics. It is about 55% done and I'm aiming to release it before the end of the year, but I'm not putting a date on it because I'm unsure whether I'll be able to complete it.
2021: Lost and Found
My second game jam was an experience with collaborating to create the game. I decided to experiment with a different engine and I used Multimedia Fusion.
I had briefly used the engine for the first year of university but I didn't understand it very well because I was used to more advanced coding than the block-based coding system. We decided to create a short platformer of a cat trying to return home to the stars. I thought it was a very cute game and I have to extend thanks to midori_berry who did the art for the game.
2022: Duality
My third game jam experience was the first jam I used Unreal Engine at. My university was primarily teaching me Unreal Engine and the workflow of producing 3D models and the visual blueprint programming system.
My team, composed of midori_berry, Nibby49 and DJG523, created a small visual novel in Unreal Engine. It was primarily made using layered widgets for each property: a background, dialogue box, and characters. However, now that I've experimented more with the engine and worked out how to use more features: I could have made that into one widget and gone from there. I also didn't understand about image compression settings which caused the game to lag in areas when it was loading assets.
2023: Roots
My fourth game jam experience was interesting because I worked on two projects instead of one that year. I worked solo on 'dotroot', my own game project, and also produced music for another team who worked on 'Reign of the Rabbit King'.
dotroot was meant to be an alternate reality game for a project I wanted to work on but I never found the motivation to complete it. It was meant to be a terminal where you could enter commands in and it would change the text accordingly based on certain commands entered. I was happy with the project at the time because you can look at the project and figure out how I did it. (But let's be real, don't look at the project because the coding is all over the place. There are definitely better ways to do the code that I did there.)
I enjoyed writing a little bit of music for Reign of the Rabbit King. It was only two tracks but I felt they fit very well for the game. Sadly, since it was made in Microsoft PowerPoint, we weren't able to actually embed the music in the game but the assets were made available for people to view and listen to.
2024: Make Me Laugh
My fifth game jam experience was also working with two projects, one by myself and helping out on another. I worked on 'Useless Button' for my solo project, and helped with the music for 'Customer Assistant Chaos'.
Useless Button ended up being made in Unreal Engine and focused primarily on widgets again. I had gained some further knowledge with using 'z-order' to place elements in specific layers on the widget itself. This definitely helped with the interactive controls for the player to use on the game. Because this game was my fifth jam, I decided to reference older games I had made in this one with a few stickers to represent them when you reach a certain number of clicks. If I were to remake this game, I would add a few more elements to it or a different number panel system. It was basically a bare-bones clicker game with no reason to click it until the max number.
Through working on Customer Assistant Chaos, I actually managed to engage further with the team and I helped out with the soundtrack for Adorable Dog: Gnomeageddon, a game their studio released on Steam. (You should go check it out.)
2025: Bubble
My most recent game jam experience was an attempt at three game projects but I only managed to complete two of them. 'Bubbleblast!' was some further experimentation with using widgets and their additional functions like hovering over an image, and spawning controls on the widget itself.
'Crab Journey' was an attempt at creating something using raw C++ in Visual Studio. I wanted to create an RPG but only using a console ASCII display. It was a project I once did for university, where we had to make a blackjack and text adventure game using a console project. Why the crab aesthetic? You can thank a little game called 'Crab Champions'. It's a pretty fun game and the music is absolutely outstanding, I love it.
I want to revisit this project and create a more fleshed out version of the game. I've learned a few more things about C++, namely namespaces, which would greatly improve the efficiency and overall structure of my project which I want to write better and learn from it. From my experience of this jam, I would recommend only doing one project to keep things less stressful. Remember, you are there to have fun and make a project - even if it's unfinished - you just want to have a good time!
Future thoughts
I don't know what to expect for this upcoming jam, but I am looking forward to it! It will be the tenth game that I work on and I want to make it special. How I do that is probably dependent on the theme though so just need to wait for it!
Reading list
Xylxn: The Gate of Colour · (2020)
Cosmic Kitten · (2021)
Nigen-sei · (2022)
dotroot · (2023)
Reign of the Rabbit King · (2023)
Useless Button · (2024)
Customer Assistant Chaos · (2024)
Bubbleblast! · (2025)
Crab Journey · (2025)