okutama jamming
· 2-minute read
i participated in global game jam in okutama for the second time & it was lovely, again! (the first time was in 2023.)
(this is the updated version - if you want to play the original jam version made over a weekend check out the global game jam page! also you can press enter to change the language)
making a game in okutama
the night before (i guess day 0.5?) of the jam was done remotely so everyone could attend from wherever they wanted, but on the full first day (saturday) we first went on a tour of the nippara limestone cave. this ended up being the 'setting' for our game, where you are a bubble travelling through a cave.
since the tour guide said there were bats living in the cave (though she'd never seen one herself), we ended up adding bats as obstacles in our game too! there are also frogs, but i forget why...
one of the areas inside the cave had a metal dish which would let out a lovely ring every time a water droplet hit it, so we added water droplets to the game too. (gloyard made some lovely water dropping sfx for this!)
the text that pops up in the game are names of the actual rock formations of the nippara cave, so if you ever get a chance to go, you can compare the rocks in the game to the ones in the cave!
what i always like about the okutama jam site is that it's not just jamming - the organiser (hamada) always sets up activities where we get to explore okutama a bit, which i think is lovely. it's a beautiful place & i don't want to just go there, make a game, & go home. besides the limestone cave tour, we also had an impromptu night tour of nippara by one of the hotel staff, & we ate lots of delicious local food 😋
i'm happy we made a game based on our experiences in okutama & also enjoyed ourselves doing it!
making games in a team is fun!!!
i always think this when doing a jam, but making a game in a team is great. usually i work mostly on my own when doing my games, but for Bubble Cave, i mostly just did the art!
everyone else was really talented & just a pleasure to jam with. one of the things i like about this jam site is that the teams are mostly random - you specify what you want to do at the jam (e.g., art, music, code, &c.) & there might be some shuffling based on that, but otherwise names are pretty much just drawn out of a hat! so what kind of game you end up making depends a lot on what your team is capable of as such.
on our team we had three people (hiko, polm23, me) already familiar with pico-8 so that's what we ended up using. hiko was in charge of coding & is generally just a pico-8 wizard, while hamada and gloyard hadn't used the engine before. however, gloyard knows trackers so had no trouble putting together some awesome tracks, & hamada made us a wonderful map with the nippara cave rock formations after he'd become more familiar with the engine.
polm23 was also integral in making sure everything actually got done as the leader/planner. nearing the end when we were pretty tight on time he kept us on track!
it was invigorating to actually meet up & just make something for fun with other people & it's made me excited about making other things too! (i really want to get back into making board games too after playing some card games a person on another team made...)
anyway, Bubble Cave only turned out the way it did because we all worked together to make it, & i think we did a great job 🫧🐸🦇 hope you enjoy playing it too!
(if you enjoyed this post, give polm23's post about his experience at the okutama jam site a read too!)