This semester, SSU decided to shake things up with how they managed the spring game jam. Instead of deciding on a theme ahead of time, we held an art contest, and the winning piece became the game jam theme. With this in mind, my group decided to abstract from the piece some of the key features we identified in it, there were themes of paranoia, disguise, hiding yourself, large prominent eyes from shadowy figures watching you, and we decided that we could put all of that into the umbrella idea of "big brother". Those two words, "big brother", shifted the way we started to brain storm, leading us to where we ended up, playing as big brother, while you escort little brother to the top of a big obstacle course.

While the course may be trivial to you, your brother isn't quite as "gamer", so it's your job to make sure he gets to the top! He's a bit distractable, so using your mic, you can call to him to get his attention, or sit with him for a bit until he's ready to move on if you'd like him to be a bit more cooperative in the future. Be as evil or patient as you like! The choice is ultimately up to you.

The idea itself didn't require any concrete setting, and with the core concept being inspired by Bennett Foddy's "Getting Over It", we decided that since it was going to be our last chance to jam together as a group at Shawnee, we would use assets from our old projects to relive some of our iconic jams in a fresh new way, kinda like a virtual museum! Even if some of the games featured didn't quite meet the expectations we originally hoped for them, this gave us a chance to spin the narrative around it into something we can look back on a little more fondly, and i certainly think we delivered. Each games section of the map has some sort of unique gimmick based on that game. Fear the Forgotten has a list of chores you need to complete before you can progress, Trash Lord makes you horde garbage until the pile is large enough to make the next jump, Gunkey has spinning arms to knock you off, and a shotgun ready to blow you off the stage, and Bubblequest has some bouncy bubbles ready to launch you to the next platform.

While it may not be quite the "looker" start to finish, since we couldn't steal a full-time artist for this jam, we certainly put in the work to make it a complete experience, and I think we did this jam proud, going out with a bang. If you'd like to try it yourself, you can try it out here! Due to the limitations of neocities, there are some performance issues running the game, and I can't use the microphone when it's embeded here, so I recommend for the full, intended experience, you still download the game on the official Itch.io page.

I participated in this jam with my usual game jam crew, plus 3 additional strangers we picked up along the way. We all decided to cut back the scope of our jam considering the general struggle that we've had to keep up with delivering the vision of our games in the past, needless to say we once again put ourselves in over our heads : ))). When we heard the theme of the jam was "bubble", we decided to make a walking-sim where you explore and interact with characters that have bubbly personalities. In a complexity sense, it should have been stoopid easy, however, we failed to account for the amount of time that would be needed to actually fill in the content. I spent the entire time working on the starting level, and within the span of about an hour I also cracked out the voice acting in the final day of the jam. On day one, tasks were delegated and everyone got to work; two people were tasked with creating the dialog, our artist got to work on character art, someone was designated to make the dialog system, someone was tasked with making the player controller, and the last of us were set to level design and creating any art needed for it.

After planning out our setting and a couple of silly characters on the first day, we all chugged along on our designated tasks, working together and helping out where we could, jammin' out with some of the other groups as we went along, and at the end of day one, I made some pretty decent progress on the first area, plotting out the town layout and placing some markers for where NPCs should go. We got some decent output for dialog and character designs, our player controller was finished, and everything was moving swimmingly, or so it seemed...

At the beginning of day 2, we finally got our hands on the dialog system one of the team members spent the first day working on, and we realized there was some... miscommunication... The dialog system that was made was not structured in any fashion that was usable for what we needed. It worked really well for some foreign concept that I personally still don't understand, I saw it in action, but for what we needed, it wasn't it. We ended up spending about 70% of our time on day 2 wrestling with the dialog system to get it working how we needed it to, but we managed to get something together right before the deadline. I kept pushing updates to the map I was working on, but the unexpected setback with the dialog system led to some delays in the expected output, and our final build for the jam didn't manage to get any audio outside of the dialog, which was iffy at best.

Needless to say, we fell short of our hopes for the project, but we remained determined to put the pieces together and make it something worth playing, so after the jam we've been making some touch-ups, and now the game is going up on itch.io for all to bask in its glory. As of right now it's still a work-in-progress, but as soon as we get all the changes implemented, I'll be sure to link the final product here. We're doing the face lift in our free time, so it might be a while before we make "Bubble Quest: Fully Blown" public

I found out Godot recently changed the way web exporting works to allow for single-threaded apps, meaning you no longer need shared array buffers! That was previously holding me back from being able to upload web builds of my games to my site, however if this works you can expect more games to be playable straight from this page! I likely won't update older games to support this, but future jams and whatnot that are able will definitely be seen here.

What you can play is a little demo project I started working on for the 2024 Pirate Software Game Jam, however about 90% of the jam overlapped with when I was leaving for my Japan trip, so I didn't really make a submission, rather I just used the time I had to experiment with a couple different things I was noodling on at the time. That being a desire to figure out gridmaps and wanting to figure out how to make a better camera. The Idea I came up with was a 3D platformer where you're a vampire trying to gather ingredients to a potion that will let you live in the sun, however you have to brave the day in order to collect all of the supplies. It's really small and ugly and there really isn't anything to do, but at least the character controller feels pretty decent in my opinion. I have zero intention to fix anything in this project that isn't finished or is broken, I'm just leaving it here as a bit of a milestone marker because I think it's really cool we can do stuff like this now :D

This was a doozie... My group made Fear the Forgotten, a horror-ish game inspired by Phasmophobia and Who's Your Daddy where you play the role of a nun trying to manage your catholic orphanage, but the kids won't stay in bed because they're afraid of the monsters under their bed and in their closet! So, it's your job to show them that it's safe, but what if it wasn't?

That was the original vision, but it didn't exactly end like that. Being a game jam, everyone had to work quick on whatever was available, but in doing that, most of the important work ended up getting done at the END, since everyone was stuck waiting for certain jobs to be finished, and just did busywork in the mean time, so there are lots of interactions that CAN happen, but how integral they are to the game is... subjective.

There were 2 things I did during this project. I wanted to focus solely on sound design, so those entire systems are my baby; the spatial panning if you're close to a wall, the muffled sounds for audio through walls, echoing when far away, as well as all the actual audio editing and conditions for playing. The other thing was being thrust into the position of project lead, primarily the management came up once people stopped finding tasks for themselves, but since I came up with the original idea, and I have the most experience with the engine, people naturally came to me when they had questions, and most of the time I was just squashing bugs and trying to make sure everything moved smoothly.

Things got a little tricky with management, since not everyone ended up being on the same page about things, but they didn't bring it up until they already finished working on tasks, so some things needed re-done a few times just because other systems weren't ready by the time it was "finished", or it didn't actually serve the purpose it was meant for. The resources were out there for them to find out what they needed on the Trello tasks, but keeping up with the Trello seemed to be a weak point for the group as a whole (honestly, me too. once I finished writing all the tasks I didn't go back to look at it, though that's because I had my own personal list of tasks for myself saved elsewhere).

All-in-all, I'm pretty proud of what I managed to get done for this project, even if it doesn't really deliver on the original expectations. I'm not even sure if it's fun yet, we didn't have a working version until about 5 minutes before the deadline, so I haven't even played it with all the pieces assembled yet!

The jam was stressful for sure, the worst one I've been a part of yet, but it's also for sure the most fun I've had during a jam, no doubt in my mind. The shared pain of all my team members, the ridiculous lack of art direction from our artists, goofing around with the other groups camping out in the ATC, and laughing about the ridiculous bugs that came up made all the stress worth it. The whole thing was just one giant series of unfortunate events, but knowing that I still had my team by my side made it bearable. My car stalled in the street on the first day when I left to go get everyone pizza, this was the first sign of things to come...

It wasn't the first time my car stalled for seemingly no reason, when I was moving in this semester, it happened right at the start of the long drive to the university, and when we took it to the shop to get looked at, they couldn't find ANYTHING, and it just ran fine after for MONTHS. That's seeming to be the case again here, but I haven't had the chance to check it out again yet. But my team came down to rescue me and push the car back into the parking lot, one of them FaceTime'd their dad and we were all troubleshooting together, but we couldn't find anything. After that fiasco we got pizza and when we came back, my laptop wouldn't turn on. FANTASTIC. Eventually after holding the power button for a few minutes, I got the windows bluescreen, which was actually a GOOD sign because that just means my bios reset themselves, and I knew how to fix it from there. Night 1 Nightmares were finally over.

Day 2 was where our work started going downhill, I initially tried to start the day in the recording studio to get some cute little voice clips for the kids, some screams of terror, and a couple demon growls, but all the equipment was missing! I ended up running back to my dorm to grab a mic and using the booth with my own stuff so it worked out, but it was a huge waste of time initially with all the running around I had to do. We also finally got some of our first art assets, but they did NOT fall in line with the style we discussed previously, so I went ahead and posted some more reference material in the discord so hopefully they could get the idea a little better, I directed them to it and they all responded so I KNOW they saw it, but from this point to the end of the jam, they never conformed to the style guide. sadness. This day is also when we made doors, the person who made them hadn't worked with animation players before, so it basically took them the full day to get it ironed out and working properly, no disrespect, I was confused too, but by the end of the day, we got it done. We also pulled a late night, listening to sick jams and sharing dope videos while we worked, all while us and the other groups there trolled each other, and even making a human table. I ended up calling it a night ~6:00 AM, got 4 hours of sleep, and came right back to get back to work on our final day.

Morning of day 3 we finally got the model for our kid, and... wow... It wasn't rigged and we didn't have anything else we could work with, so I just dumped it into mixamo and we called it a day. This was the busiest we'd been, cracking out our critical systems left and right, when suddenly, BAM. There are doors everywhere haunting someone's project. Every scene you open, there's a door at the origin, and it's HUGE. That is... until you open the door, then miraculously they disappeared from the other scenes, like nothing ever happened... This is when we broke, THE MADNESS got to us. We crunched down to the wire, and eventually, we made it to the deadline. 50 seconds before it was over we made our submission, it was held together with duct tape gum and toothpicks, but we made it. The morning after I went back and uploaded a web build, and now we're calling it complete. That's what I call a big win. Try it if you want, or don't, I can't make you, but I think that's what I'm about to do :3