Sometimes there comes an event called a game jam, and last weekend was one of those times. What a game jam is, put simply, is a competition when a group of people come together for some interval of time, often multiples of 24 hours, and sit down and make games from scratch, with the goal of having a finished product by the end of the time period.

The competition I went to this time was hosted by my university's game development club, of which I am a part of, and was set to be 48 hours (ended up as about 46 though). Teams could be anywhere from one to four people, and mine in particular was four. We were all computer science students, so everyone but me (hehe) took up a non-programming role. Our artist is a pretty good drawer, so she handled the pixel art. Our musician had never composed before, but had been playing instruments for a majority of his life, and he was surprisingly good at it. Lastly our level and story designer had no experience in her field as well, but she thoroughly enjoyed that job and I think she did an excellent job as well.

So after helping setting up the event, the time for the theme to be revealed rolled around. There were a few technical difficulties, but it all worked out.

The theme: inundation. This word has two official meanings. The first is just a large amount of objects, and the second is when water rises and takes over land. My team, as well as almost all of the teams surprisingly, went for the latter meaning.

After being let loose from the opening ceremonies, there was a game to be made. Naturally, however, we did as any good adults should do and made a blanket fort before we even had an idea of what to make. It was great and we were the envy of everyone for having a blanket fort :P

Acting like children aside, we then set out to actually design a game. We spent a little over an hour in this planning stage, and the idea we eventually decided upon was that of a flooding building, with the player having to drain all the water out of the building before it flooded over or the player drowned.

The next 40-ish hours was occupied by us struggling to make everything in time, sleeping, and taking breaks to ease our minds and stretch our legs. There were our fair share of struggles, namely sleepiness and getting a little too on edge about things, but overall we worked well together.

Here are some screenshots of the game were managed to come up with:

Look familiar? The game used a heavily modified version of the engine I made for Messan, so it's only natural that they look similar. The two games even share the same 2 player ability. I had to break a lot of the code to get sound and the water effects to work correctly though:

Speaking of water effects, they turned out surprisingly well. Believe it or not, there is only one sprite in the game with water on it, and the entire effect of the water filling up is done with some black magic code that even I don't fully understand (tired Kyle created some weird solutions). This effect is probably my most proud feature of the game, as it isn't the sort of graphical feature that you normally see in 2D sprite based games. Anyways:

I lost to my own game. Yep. That last puzzle is hard. Might fudge it with two player next time to see the meme at the end:

Yep, somehow pulled off a full four level game in 46 hours. Still not sure quite how.

What I'm even less sure about what we managed to do though is winning awards! The game jam we participated in had a total of seven awards: 1st through 3rd overall, best original art, best original sound, best use of AI, and most social good. We managed to win three of the awards :3 Specifically, we got 3rd place overall, as well as best original sound and art. Our artist wasn't confident in herself at all, but she really did a fantastic job (also she is the artist for Messan). Our musician was even more surprised though, as this was his first time making music.

However, all awards and great times considered, the best moment of the whole jam was when I walked back into the room we made our games in and saw three little boys trying their best to beat the game on my laptop in two player mode. They almost made it to the end too! They gave our game praise, saying they thought it was the best of the jam, and that really hit home. Seeing children having fun with your creation is just an incredibly rewarding experience, and is one I can't quite explain :*)

If you want to try our game for yourself, you can download it for free... just please ignore the other taco-based game on the list that I made by myself in a different competition :P It's only for windows and hasn't been worked on since the competition. We will likely polish it a little in the future though.

One actual Messan related note: the other level design and musician of our game from the jam have agreed to join the production of Messan in a Bottle, and now that we have more than 46 hours to work, we hope for some excellent work from all of us... eventually :P College takes a lot of time, what can I say?

Thanks for reading my story, hope you found our shenanigans to be entertaining and see you next time.

Where to find the game: https://pi-memorizer.itch.io/operation-inundation