I was meaning to post this sooner, but along with work piling up and losing track, I did quite a few game jams. Three in particular: RemakeJam, Jamchester and Ludum Dare.

I’ll mention Running The Marathon first, because I only finished the game two days ago from posting. This was made for Ludum Dare 39, which makes it the 10th Ludum Dare I participated (and 9th I submitted a game independently). This was a bit of a last minute entry because until Saturday evening, I had no intention of making something for LD. What changed my mind was a game idea I was coming up with as a joke, running a marathon and making sure you don’t run out of energy. What I ended up with was a bit of a joke on the Track & Field concept, by having rapid button presses make your chances at success worse. Because of how little time I worked on this, the background animations and sounds are lacking, although I do think the running animation on the player turned out okay.

As is the tradition of Ludum Dare, voting will be going on by all participants for a total of three weeks. Any Ludum Dare entrants can go to the game’s Ludum Dare event page to vote and comment.

Next I’ll talk about Dash Dodge, which was developed for Jamchester 2017, a professional games jam that I took part in last year. This year, I was in a team which consisted of another programmer & sound designer (Jessica Winters) and two artists (Li Huang and Andrea Maestri). All in all, this was a great team to work with, and we had a heavily planned out game about combatting bosses using only dashing, with a time travel element, although we may have over-anticipated our goals a bit. Needless to say, we made a game with a nice visual style and some neat mechanics thrown around. Hopefully at some point in the future I would like to work with these three again at some point.

Finally, there is 8-Bit Theater: Black Mage is in a Shooting Game. This game, developed for RemakeJam, is a remake of a previous game of mine. In particular, this is a remake of the first game I ever made from back in 2010. What was great about working on this is that I still have the original source project and most of the original assets and notes, although I did have to dig through Google for a copy of GameMaker 8.1 in order to view the original project. Sadly because of lack of time (I rarely allow full days of focus for these game jams, I’ve noticed), I just about managed to remake the original two levels and boss. This wasn’t for naught though, as way back when it took me over a year to reach this far, and this time I managed to achieve the same amount in less than a week. I also took advantage of my own game framework to try out some technical challenges, such as parallax scrolling.

Game Jams are fun, I like taking part in them for those short bursts of game ideas and development challenges. Sadly participating is made more difficult when my day-job takes priority, but when I get a chance to take part I’d like to take full reigns!

Now time for some voting and other challenges!