First off, I'll link our game, Subatomic, and its submission to the game jam. My account is blazecus, you can see the other game jams I've done on there. These are all games that were developed in a few days - or less, given that we're often busy on the weekends too. They're made in hours - so there isn't going to be any polish.

The screenshots we used on the game page

"Built to scale" as a theme led to many similar games, I thought. Lots of spins on common types of games, with the ability to change your own size or that of the world. To me, this theme seemed best suited for puzzle games, which I only saw a few of. The invented genre of "2d platformer with changing scales" definitely seemed to be the most popular type of game, but ultimately I felt it wasn't too interesting.

We ended up making a puzzle game, although the controls and world were a 2D platformer. The concept of the game was a Portal-like puzzle game - portals would work as they do in Portal, except that portals could change the size of objects. Each level would involve using the size and weights of objects and the player to solve puzzles. For example, momentum is preserved through portals, so when you changed the scale (and thus, mass), you would get a slower or faster object. As some puzzles required certain speeds, this was used as a puzzle mechanic. Other important ones were just shapes of objects needed to make bridges or fit the object through an area, or the weights of objects being too heavy to move at certain sizes but also need to be heavy enough to press a pressure plate.

Most of my work for this game jam was artwork - which is always a painstaking task. To be honest, I didn't feel like this game jam was my best work. I did have very little time to work on it, as I had other obligations this weekend. I wrote a couple shaders to provide interesting backgrounds - but ultimately, they were just simple operations based on noise. I suppose they were interesting enough.

Participating in this game jam kinda changed my perspective on how I should approach them. Up until now, my approach has been to just do what I can to get the project done - we always had some idea of what the game would be, and I wasn't too concerned with anything beyond making it presentable.

This time, after reviewing more games, I was both inspired to treat it more as a competition (I think I have enough practice at this point to produce games pretty quickly, that game jams just as practice isn't necessary anymore), and to really think about what could be done to make a game stand out and be enjoyable for players. I really think this is a different task than for a normal game.

Specifically, I am really interested in how I can make our game jam games pop out visually. The gameplay is always going to depend on the idea, but the artwork of our games needs to be much more appealing or unique in game jams than the generic pixel art I've been making so far, along with the thumbnails and screenshots and such. And I want to approach this problem from my expertise in graphics - specifically, through computational methods such as shaders, procedural animation/generation, and such. These provide the additional benefit in game jams of being quickly produced once the legwork is done - so my current plan is to set up some templates for basic building blocks of art, with some sophisticated graphics techniques involved. Then, we can plug these into whatever game we decide to make for the jam, and adjust the manual art accordingly.

For 2D platforming type games, for example, I really want to make some scenes that resemble the look of Rain World - that game has a perfect aesthetic and feel, in my mind.