I love entering game jams! Designing new rooms at EscapeWorks meant we would plan for new experiences for weeks, and go into intense detail so constructing new rooms would take as little time as possible. I still retain those detail-oriented skills, but game jams push the envelope so I don’t get the luxury of weeks, only days!
So far, each of the jams I’ve done have pushed me to make better and better content, and with each one I’ve found new elements to develop for future games.
American Kaiju was designed to be a mix of Rampage and Donkey Kong Country- juggling physics-based movement and city destruction.
American Kaiju: HARDBOILED
American Kaiju was a fun week-long jam I tackled with three friends. The jam had a very open-ended theme, so a buddy in the Discord suggested a sub-theme for us.
“Chicken,” he said.
"Chicken?"
Our other immediate drafts and ideas were thrown out. We had been given a strange new challenge. One we couldn’t back down from! To do so would be chi-
Excuse me. …To do so would be a sign of extreme cowardice.
Had I ever truly lived before I studied how a chicken walks for three hours? Clearly my life was missing this essential experience.
American Kaiju, like most game jams, tested our teamwork, our ability to maintain consistency, and our confidence to commit to release. On the team, I was the jack-of-all-trades manager, and I oversaw programming, art, and the story. Giving our rooster kaiju protagonist a voice was a challenge, but I storyboarded intro and outro sequences that gave the experience flavor.
It also tested the design skills I sharpened in my escape room days. Simply put, we had many ideas, but a very limited window for completion. Scope is a gigantic challenge in its own right, but my experiences planning how I could reformat an escape room in two days helped give me the vision to keep things simple here, too. We kept our priorities and released on time.
Retro game assets help keep the project focused and achievable.
Hungry for a Biscuit
After learning the skills I needed to publish a finished Godot game, I was eager to try again, so I pushed myself to do a solo game jam. I submitted Hungry for a Biscuit to the Brackeys Game Jam 2025.2, making the step from 2D to 3D. Hungry took the jam’s theme, “Risk it for the Biscuit,” to a far too literal level, but I had a blast making it. The game is a small dungeon crawler, where you need to find a biscuit, dunk it into a mug of coffee, and then run it back to its owner before it dries back up. The game gave me the skills I wanted to add into future projects, like incorporating physics and adaptive UI.
Future project... I love the aesthetic of sprites and 3D models, especially if they can blend together to evoke retro-futurism.
While the game was simple, I was happy to see that environmental elements I added like spatial audio and grid-based movement get praise from the judges. I worked with new software, Trenchbroom and Blender, adding to my Aseprite work from American Kaiju. This was a large step up for me. With Hungry, I made a small environment I could relax in, a vibe I carry to my future projects.