I’ve entered a few jams before, but none since becoming a parent two years ago (turns out your free time goes bye-bye, who knew?). So even though this jam’s dev period was longer than most of the jams I entered before, I knew from the start that I pretty much had like 6 hours or so available (around 2 hours per day on the weekend, bouncing up and down with my daughter in the baby carrier, and whatever little time I could grab here and there in downtime at work or during lunch breaks).

I knew I needed a simple idea to be achievable in the time I had available, and when I saw the theme it came pretty quickly, although honestly I kinda worked backwards from realising I could backronym “SPIN” to describe something serious. I basically started thinking of words starting with ‘N’ and as soon as I had ‘navigation’ the rest fell into place: navigate by spinning the earth. Then I just had to come up with the rest of the title. Serious & Precise International Navigation. Nailed it.

I had more ideas I’d have liked to implement if I had more time to work on it:

• highlight the target country
• boost/brake power-ups so you have a chance to adjust your spins (probably limited use, 3x per run or so)

And I would have liked a bit more time to work on exactly how the planet spins:

• currently the speed is set by the average speed of the mouse drag. I considered making it a “click and drag an arrow to set direction and strength”, which might be more familiar to players (something like what SpIn A Hurry did in this jam!), but decided that felt less like spinning the planet than the method I went for. Not sure I’d make the same choice if I started again. Even if so, it might feel better with some more complex curve defining input -> speed rather than the linear relationship I have now.
• and currently the planet slows down at a constant rate. Again, I wonder if some sort of curve might help it feel more intuitive/predictable/satisfying.

Overall though, given the time I had available and the fact it’s my first completed project in Godot*, I’m pretty happy with what I put together.

Serious & Precise International Navigation

*I say my first completed one because I do have an older Godot project I’ve been working on for a while, at least in theory, but I don’t think I’ve opened it this year.

Had a blast! I was all in on this one from day one. Normally I code and use marketplace assets but this time around I wanted to build all 3D models and animate myself. Part of it was to learn the Unreal Engine control rig / sequencer flow for animation. Worked quite well so I hit my goals! I have had some ideas floating around for a Quake project but never got that far with them, so went for the 90s shooter vibe. =)

It's the first time my friend and I participated in a game jam of such scale! And I think it went pretty well! And I'm pretty satisfied with the state of completeness and polish my game ended up in. 

My team (a two-person team) spent the first three days trying to decide on an idea. Those few days were quite a struggle as we kept coming up with small ideas that were fine yet not good enough to make into a stand-alone game. We ultimately ended up developing our game from the idea of a Rubik's Cube platformer, where we were planning to have terrain/platforms that change when you rotate the Rubik's Cube. We had several problems with this idea, though, namely how to have intuitive controls, how to implement the rotation, and how to design puzzles (might be difficult to prevent the player from going off the designated path). 

Therefore, we took a step away from the idea of Rubik's Cube, and instead went with rotating cubes that are connected by poles. It's still a platformer, but with less complexity and is easier to design levels for. There are still lots of technical challenges, such as creating a 360-degree camera, making connected cubes rotate together, and figuring out the controls. 

The first part I worked on was connecting all the cubes together and writing scripts that determine which cube will rotate. I viewed all the connected cubes as a graph with interconnected nodes, and wrote an algorithm that traverses through the graph to find all the cubes that should rotate. It worked, and it's the first real data structure/algorithm I've ever put into a game, so I'm pretty glad I've done it.

After that, creating and tuning the camera, the platformer control, and the interaction with cubes took most of the time during the jam, leaving us only have a day to design levels. We did manage to create 7 levels, but could definitely make more if there's more time.  

Overall, I really like my game and have enjoyed this jam! There are challenges, but I feel lucky that there's nothing that kept me stuck for too long. 

Here's my game if you want to try it out: 

https://andeeeeez.itch.io/octoshift

This was my first game jam ever... I think I was just lucky and unlucky to be with a lot of very dedicated developers. I would often stay up to around 2 am working on music. I'm not at all at a professional level, so it took me a bit to produce just one song. But I did have lots of fun. Also, I feel like I've improved and actually accomplished something with my music! Here is the game:/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4700100 

This is my first jam. I joined 5 day before deadline :( i think i can’t do that as solo dev and all things (i like to work alone, it’s more control.) and i tried it. Sometime stressed, sometime excited when my code worked lol. all of assets except font i made it myself. i am pianist who loved to code and this game happen : /jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4714932

Hey guys!

Me and 6 other people participated in the jam. 

We had:

• 1 person for 3d assets
• 1 person for the UI and sprite creation
• 1 person for the balancing and scene management 1 person for general project management
• 3 people for programming and minor scene adjustments

I have never entered a jam with a team and I develop my games solo. Since I was the one who started writing the code immediately after we got the idea for the game I set up the base architecture and the main systems and all of a sudden I became the janitor of the codebase and the person people reached out concerning how to insert the new compositions into the project or how to implement something,

Since I am a self thaught programmer it was incredible to feel competent and actually having confidence in myself and that I know what I'm doing. Throughout the whole jam we did not have merge conflicts and the code stayed very maintanable.

I am very proud of the outcome. Please share your thoughts and critism, it would be most welcome!

Have a nice day guys!

https://egodeath4397.itch.io/spiral-energy

I've participated in 3 jams prior.

I started the jam a little disappointed in the theme, as I'm not one to prefer spinning, but I started thinking anyways. I severely underscoped the project idea, and by day 4 I had everything I had planned out designed and just added more content for the rest of the week. 

The submission time ends, and my project is getting more views, comments, and interaction in general than I've ever received before, and I even got featured in a YouTube video by a small creator! Everything is turning out pretty great for the end of the jam. 

I have hopes, but in a jam of this size, I don't expect too much.  I'm just glad people are genuinely enjoying my game.  :)

https://bd2010.itch.io/cheater

Good luck with the rest of the jam!

I had a great time! I'm a solo dev and went in to this jam initially thinking I would probably use external assets for the art, but ended up making almost everything myself in Blender. I'm mainly a programmer and for a long time I never even considered art as something I was capable of, so this has boosted my confidence a lot!

https://gamewizardgriffin.itch.io/super-serious-battle-tops