Since my last blog post, I’ve being doing bits and pieces of gamedev, but the most interesting stuff I’ve done were the two online game jams I participated in.

The first one was Ludum Dare 42. I had some problems that weekend and didn’t manage to wrap up the game as well as I would’ve wanted, but I am pretty satisfied with the experience design-wise! The theme was “running out of space”, and my first idea was that you played as an army of jellos monsters that could absorb enemies and then freeze their bodies to trap the baddies and “kill” them. The bigger the jello you used the easier it was to capture enemies, but you ended up using more space, making it harder to traverse the map.

I liked the idea and actually managed to program most of the basic mechanics but… it wasn’t feeling fun. I was playing with different ideas for challenges, but I didn’t feel like any of them were interesting mechanically. So… I decided to switch ideas! Looking at other projects, I saw many people were making games with shooting, and I also wanted to make something with shooting. But how could I make something original? My idea was to make a game about… shooting walls. To defeat enemies you’d have to smash them against a wall, but the more walls you shot the less space you’d have and the harder it’d become to evade enemies. I got inspired by Tetris and made the walls into tetrominoes, so you’d have to be even more careful with your shooting. My final game is really janky and glitchy, but I feel like it’s an really interesting idea mechanic-wise. You can play Tetromino Ghost Smasher here!

The next jam I participated in was a much smaller and intimate one. A couple of weeks ago Chile celebrated its independence, and together with some other chilean gamedevs we decided to organize a week long game jam to celebrate the ocasion by making Chile-themed games. It was a lot of fun! I made a grid based arcade like game about cooking anticuchos (Chilean meat skewers), jokingly calling it “Juan’s Anticucho Roll” as a reference to Stephen’s Sausage Roll (although no, my name isn’t Juan, it just sounded more chilean). I had tons of difficulty getting the movement code to work so I didn’t have time to add all the interesting ideas I had, but it seems like the end result was fun neverthess as I ranked first place overall in the voting :) You can play it here.

And if these two games weren’t enough, I’m participating in a physical jam in a couple of weekends! I’ll be sure to post about that then.

In the meantime… I’ve been playing around with little experiments, but none of them have caught my attention.  I got hit by the itch to start a long term project… and I listened to it. I decided to make a multiplayer infection game in Construct, which will be a fun mix of experimenting and making something bigger. I’m currently still learning how to do multiplayer in Construct, but I already created a devlog over at TIG! You can follow the lastest updates on the game over there.