Nightfall

This game was created as an entry for Godot Wild Jam #55, a game jam with the theme 'Dreams'. The jam had a time limit of nine days in total, and during those nine days, the active development time was somewhere around 15 hours.

The gameplay is a simple endless runner where the player tries to avoid obstacles that appear from the bottom of the screen. The trick is that the player can slow down the descend speed of the falling character by screaming into the microphone. Out of the 92 entries that the game jam had, Nightfall won the 'Originality' category.

As obstacles, I tried to use all kinds of crazy and absurd things you could imagine seeing in nightmares: lizard eyes, tentacles, skulls, and road signs, to name a few. The game ended up being a little too easy, and it's quite possible to survive without screaming into the microphone. Nonetheless, I had a good laugh while developing it, and winning the 'Originality' category was certainly a nice surprise.

Kalewave

Realizing I had never done a platformer before, I wanted to make one. It was interesting to read and implement different detailed mechanisms (such as coyote time, input buffering, etc.) that go into making a two-dimensional platformer. I tried to create the character and its movement as reusable and configurable as possible by separating the functionality into an addon for Godot Engine.

I started the development with version 4.0 beta (can't quite recall which beta was available at the time) of the engine and had to evolve the project as the engine developed, so there was a lot of refactoring related to that.

The game theme struck me mid-project as I listened to a lot of synthwave music during development and started to read Kalevala as well. The game name is a mashup of the two themes... obviously.

The game does not have many levels, and without any threats, there’s no risk involved in gameplay, which honestly leaves the game feeling a little boring. I did want to introduce simple puzzle mechanisms to add some other challenge than just level navigation and timing the jumps correctly. Combining colors to allow passing through areas was an idea I had earlier in another prototype, which never came to be, so I implemented that idea into this game. I realize it’s not accessible at all to have a mechanism that relies purely on colors, so I created simple shapes to help distinguish between red, green, and blue colors. It’s still not the best, but it’s better than relying purely on just the colors.

All in all, it was a pretty fun project, but it took me way longer than I anticipated. It goes to show that as a hobbyist solo developer with very limited free time, you need to keep ideas compact and accept the fact that it takes a long time to make even relatively simple games.

Unfantomable Brine

Unfantomable Brine (yeah the name is mispelled) is a top-down arcade sailing game that I made for (https://itch.io/jam/godot-wild-jam-41)[Godot Wild Jam #41](https://itch.io/jam/godot-wild-jam-41). As the game jam name suggests, the game was developed using Godot Engine and had a time limit of nine days. During those nine days, I managed to put somewhere around 20 hours into the game. You can check out the game on the provided Itch page, where there's also a postmortem available where I summarize the successes and failures I identified with the game.

I might return to this idea in the future and try to take it further. I'm a fan of naval-themed games and would love to make one with a bigger scale myself as well.

HexZen

HexZen is a very casual building game that has no scores or objectives for players to worry about. It's all about building something beautiful, one piece at a time.

It was my entry for GoGodotJam, a game jam with a time frame limited to nine days and the theme 'Growth'. During those nine days, I managed to spend around ten hours creating the game, so it ended up quite unpolished and simple. However, I successfully implemented the core gameplay loop where players are randomly given a tile to place in the world or discard as they see fit to build some pleasing landscapes.

Kuumela

Kuumela is an arcade game, and it was my entry for Game Off 2020, a game jam organized by GitHub. The time was limited to a month, and during that period, I managed to spend around 15 to 25 hours creating the game from scratch.

It's built using Godot Engine, and it was the first game I have ever developed using this engine. While it could use some polishing and additional graphics and effects to provide a better experience, the core gameplay loop is quite fun and surprisingly challenging for a while. That being said, I probably will not take this game any further from its current state.