Game Jams

I’ve been participating in Game Jams lately. If you do not know what that is: teams get together for a weekend or so to compete making a game around a theme. Sort of like a hackathon. Here are a few of the projects I’ve participated in.

Juxtamomentum#

Juxtamomentum is a game about remaining in your own bubble in time, because to fix the past, you must remain in the present.

Control both the player and their time bubble, deflecting enemy projectiles away from your time bubble. If you stand outside of it for too long, time will adjust itself, and you’ll lose contact with the past.

Lords of the Wood’s Land#

This is a recovery of an old .exe file for a forgotten MMORPG from 2004.

We wanted to do something less serious this time around, especially for the Christmas time. We ended up with a charming satire game about a game in which NPCs were just simply not expecting new players anymore.

Requisition: Nostalgium#

Requisition: Nostalgium is a game about operating weird machinery by command of the Higher Order Bureau. Delve into patients’ memories to find out what happened to Camp Hillberry.

This was certainly our most ambitious Jam, and I believe it paid off in the end. We did face problems with content towards the end, but we believe the feel for the game and its potential is plain to see.

That is why we will be working more on Requisition: Nostalgium as its own, independent release. Stay tuned for that!

I worked on elements related to the printing of messages mainly in what corresponded to technical contributions, and also played a part in game design decision-making. I was particularly pleased with the setting we ended up devising for this jam. We decided to let go of some inhibitions for something a bit more serious and sinister. The result was the Higher Order Bureau becoming part of so much more, leaving us craving for content for an expansion.

The game ended up being surprisingly diegetic by the end of the jam: everything had a reason to be, and if it didn’t, it simply wasn’t there. Everything could be tied to the Bureau and their motives. Unfortunately, due to the lack of content, this was hard to express during the live demo. But nevertheless, that’s why we’re moving on to a proper release now.

Thingamajig-inator#

I love overcomplicated titles.

Thingamajig-inator is a game inspired by Design Thinking research led by Lisa Carlgren of RISE.

In this jam, we were tasked to talk to a researcher, and make a game based on their field of research or latest current projects, hence our theme. I was inclined to work some on UI for this one in particular. Despite, admittedly, not being the cleanest UI design I’ve made, I was satisfied considering the time we had.

Additionally, I dedicated some time into getting interesting particles for each piece of the players’ apparatus a little extra charm and character. As well as a few animations to bring some of the models to life.

This jam in particular didn’t have any nominations or otherwise; it was for the love of the craft. Which made the atmosphere during the jam much more relaxed and comfortable, since no one was competing at all. A nice change of pace from what I had been used to over the last year.

Heavy is the Hand#

Heavy is the Hand is a Tarot (or Tarot-ish, rather) card reading puzzle game. The king has gone mad and has decreed that any and all decisions must be left to fate. You, oracle, deal a set of three cards -past, present, and future- to an individual who’s being tried for a crime. With your tome, and considering the circumstantial nature of the reading, you should be able to deliver an accurate interpretation of what fate the individual carries. Interpret the meaning of the cards in front of you, and let the gods whisper onto you.

My role here was primarily back-end programming, and driving a narrative via writing and building encounters. I made sure we could have a very streamlined process to creating encounters so that we could avoid redundancy and make the process of creating a scenario a very simple one.

Additionally, these encounters and the events that transpired therein needed some bite, which I believe I was able to provide. Seeing people reach the conclusions with the information I’d laid out with both the readings and the dialogue in place was a nice sight.

I loved the theme here. Abstract and charged. It let us have a lot of creative interpretations, so the ideation process was bountiful. We were heavily inspired by Inscryption and Papers, Please.

Finite Monkey Theorem#

Finite Monkey Theorem is a teleprompter management game. You play the role of Murphy: a monkey in charge of telling a crowd how to react to the mishaps in the talkshow “Saturday Night with Atmos”. People on stage have a tendency to go off-script. Nassion does not like that. Will Murphy play along with Nassion’s demands and entertain Geordie Atmos’ (voiced by yours truly) lukewarm jokes?

I mostly took the role of writer and level designer for this project. The game’s main content and decision making lies is the dissonance between its script and audible dialogue. I felt capable of giving the dialogue and script enough substance to make it interesting to hear and maybe crack a few smiles here and there.

With that came the challenge of allowing this dialogue to have the correct pacing and bait-and-switch events to make it enticing to play as the one giving audience cues, and being graded for them. Guessing games and ambiguity of expected crowd reactions had to be introduced as well. Therein lied, after all, the level design of this game as well.

Level design was done via Audacity labels to denote adequacy, inadequacy, or revelry of reactions. I also helped optimizing the back-end logic programming of importing labeling as playable records.

Possessed Possessions in a bag#

Possessed Possessions in a Bag is an eerie, bite-sized stealth puzzle game with a red-light-green-light thematic. It follows a soul trapped in a bag, which resides inside a bag, which resides inside a- you get the idea. This soul is capable of possessing other objects in the bag. The player can use this to their advantage, both in movement and stealth.

Its artstyle was heavily inspired by the FAITH series. I decided to take the role of Art direction for this project to be able to carry out said style into the end product, which ended up awarding us Best Graphics.