A collection of game jams I participated in over the years. Game jams are a challenge where one person (or team) creates a game in a short timespan with a specific theme that is revealed at the start of the jam. It’s a great opportunity to challenge yourself and learn new things in a pressured environment but without real consequences.

4 days (a long weekend) of development time with a mandatory theme that is revealed on the Friday evening when this challenge starts. This year’s theme was "Built to Scale".

I started to focus on the concept of walking around on planets with gravity like in Super Mario Galaxy, and the roll mechanics of Katamari Damacy. To be honest, this was way more complex than I expected, especially handeling rotation quaternion math and directions. 2 days in, I had to compromise the mechanics, and barely got gameplay mechanics in on time. Even though I did not have enough time to create a full gameplay loop in there, I learned a lot when it comes to navigating surface normals and quaternions.

2 days (a weekend) of development time with a mandatory theme that is revealed on the Friday evening when this challenge starts. This year’s theme was "Roles Reversed".

I focused on mechanics first this year, especially the ricochet of bullets and collision detection. I also built a system to import SVG vector files to design levels early on. This gave me room to play with the system and level designs fast to figure out a good gameplay mechanic. In the end I was able to create quite a few levels using SVGs within the short time limit.

2 days (a weekend) of development time with a mandatory theme that is revealed on the Friday evening when this challenge starts. This year’s theme was "Roll of the dice".

I wanted to make a puzzle game this year, and thought I would make something where you have lots of dice rolling to add an extra layer of gameplay. I really overlooked how complex it is to roll dice in specific directions around a pivot since you cannot just mirror or rotate the animation around. Plus calculating all the collisions, and ways the dice were allowed to roll also took up a lot of time.

I got it working only 4 hours before the deadline, and had to build the rest of the game within those 4 hours.

2 days (a weekend) of development time with a mandatory theme that is revealed on the Friday evening when this challenge starts. This year’s theme was "Joined together".

This year I focused on the different projectiles you see in shoot-em-up games, and tried to recreate them. Then I got into a big rabbit hole of creating an endless background animation with the concept of a floating city in the background that needs protecting.

I started drawing the main character and their robot parrot only an hour before the deadline. And the enemies only 15 minutes until the game jam locked submissions. The mechanics are sound, but I would have wished to focus a bit more on player gameplay feedback, and better designs and animation for the enemies.