The Very Serious JuniperDev Game Jam

I entered the Very Serious GameJam by JunpierDev last week. Here's a link to what I produced. The jam lasted for 7 days but there were a few things which got in the way of me using that much time!

A major heatwave struck the UK, causing another record-breaking June. Can we please deal with the climate crisis soon? Anyway, it got too hot to do much work.

I'm still looking for a job! Job hunting is so tiring, boring, soul-draining. I really want to get something soon, even an unskilled job just to have a break from job applications.

I have to take turns looking after the baby, of course! My wife's still on maternity leave for a bit longer, so she can look after him while I'm job hunting in the day, but he has to take up some of my spare time.

Making the game

Anyway, on to the fun bit: how I made the game!

The theme was announced as "Spin to win", and all I could really think about at the start was Kuru Kuru Kururin, the classic GameBoy Advance game. I only played it a bit when visiting my cousin who had it, but it left a great mark on my that I still remember it now. It was very juicy, full of visual and sound effects.

I went with 3D graphics so I could just maths some models and shaders together rather than deal with pesky sprites and such. I started making a couple of walls to bounce off of, and a spinning player character model to bounce off of them. Getting it to spin, and to hit the walls was easy enough; getting it to reliably bounce away, based on the direction it hit the wall, was a massive challenge.

If the wall was a RigidBody3D, then they interact with physics and the player slides along it, and is pushed away so that it can continue to spin without clipping inside the wall. If the wall was an Area3D, I couldn't get reliable collision detection between it and the player. Then even once I managed to make the collisions reliable, working from both directions (spinning towards and away from the wall), trying to figure out which way we'd hit the wall and how to bounce the player in a nice way that avoided them hitting the wall again too soon, was even more hassle to math through.

Once it was colliding well enough, I put together a quick level by chucking walls around the place, made a little Win Zone, as well as win and game over screens so you can easily reset yourself; and finally, added a timer so you can see how long you took and race against other players for the best time!

Although the level was actually quite easy and also several people commented that the collisions felt quite janky, so that will need more work in the future to perfect, if I come back to this project. If I do, then of course more levels, as well as some more interesting hazards etc are in order.