RAY Game Jam

From Saturday to Sunday (18.-20.11.) I participated in a 48h long game jam where our goal was to design and produce a video game in groups of 1 to 7. Since our group consisted mostly of our classmates there will be several posts of the same event. Oh well - enjoy all these aspects of it! :^D

At first I was hesitant to participate in the jam as my skills only consist of visual and design aspects and I can't code games for my life. Our "group" at that point (aka a random array of people interested in the event) was already quite heavy in visual side and a couple of weeks beforehand we weren't even sure if we'd get a programmer, but in the end I gave in and decided to join in. And I'm glad I did! Once we got our theme ("MERGE") and got down to forming the idea for our game we managed to find things to do for everyone in our group: Justin and his girlfriend Roosa handled the coding; Mitja helped with it and made designs for the bots and the main character as well as produced the video; Miska did bots and illustrations for the splash screen; Gerda and Manu both created bots and backgrounds and Gerda also handled the sound design; and I was in charge of the UI aka the buttons, status bars and both splash and death screen designs.

So what did we actually do? Besides the theme we were allowed to create any kind of a game that could be later on presented and that other people could try on their own. Sounds complicated? For me it sounded like Mission Impossible: Hervanta Edition! In the end we made a retro-looking pixel art game Collision Jam where you're a robot surviving in constantly changing conditions (different heat, pressure and moisture levels), and in order to survive you need to catch and merge with nanobots who carry different combinations of said conditions. Each level lasts only fifteen seconds but don't think it's too easy - you have a maximum of ten seconds to adapt to the condition changes and you need to really think which bots to catch! Here are some of the assets I made and also a video introduction of the gameplay.

Environment status & level change counter

Player status

Splash screen

Death screen

Gameplay video

All in all the event was a great deal of fun! Our team worked well together and people helped each other out with different tasks. After the jam experience I am notably more interested in the game industry (as a visual designer, of course) but I really gotta decide if I want to continue solely on the graphic designer path or change the course towards the game industry. It's a really, really tough choice.

Our super team! ☆

You can download the game file from here!

Just unzip the folder and run RUN ME.EXE and you'll get to it ☆ You control the robot with arrow keys and remember - collect the right stats and be quick or ur ded!

#gamejam #videogames #mediadiary