Oct 12, 2025
This weekend I participated in my second Pitt Games 4 Social Impact game jam. Last year, I participated in a group for the game jam and let's just say it didn't go very well. Our ideas last year lacked focus, we failed to prioritize, and we didn't delegate well. On top of all of that, most of us had never even touched much of the software we needed to use to create the game we planned to make. Needless to say, it was a disaster that led to one of our group members—my partner Paige—staying up for almost all night to recreate our original idea in Twine. We ended up winning the First Penguin Award for aiming high and failing spectacularly.
Anyway, enough about last year. I've gained a considerable amount of experience and knowledge in nearly every aspect of game design and development since last year, having made several games for classes and also studied interactive narratives. I came into this year with a plan and a number of procedures and an outline of how things should go. I wanted to ensure that we set tight player experience goals, as I felt that would help us keep our scope reasonable and lead to our game being focused and getting our theme across well. This ended up working well. Following the creation of some concise player experience goals, we began brainstorming. I am once again reminded of how difficult it is to come up with good ideas in a short period of time and when you're actually trying to generate them. As a result of this, I felt that our game's gameplay didn't exactly innovate. I was worried about this at first because I felt that only a novel idea would make the game worth making. I learned that this is wrong.
We ended up going for a 2.5D platformer where you play as a penguin fleeing its home on an iceberg. Throughout your journey, you encounter other birds who—unlike you—can fly, and thus have it much easier to migrate. You encounter hardship via puzzles including sharks, collapsing platforms, and ramps which you must gain speed on to reach areas. Keeping our scope tight ended up really paying off, and most of our first full day was spent making solid bones (dialogue system, movement system, and levels). Following this, we connected them up during the night and spent time polishing on our last day.
I made the dialogue system first, which is something I find incredibly rewarding. Finding ways to impart even more life and character into simple text on the screen is something I could spend near infinite amounts of time on, yet I find myself making Animal Crossing-esque systems every time... I also ended up making assets for our main level, including some boulders and icebergs (incredibly challenging... I know), and doing miscellaneous programming tasks. This is a relatively art-focused role compared to what I usually find myself doing, which I enjoyed. On top of everything, I was our resident Git expert, tasked with fixing all merge conflicts and keeping things straight.
Our game came together with relatively few hiccups, with the exception of a number of systems breaking due to our project structure's disorganization near the end of the jam—which we fixed. After all of our hard work, we won an award for technical achievement! This was an incredible experience that was enhanced by bringing some formal structure to it, and with the addition of learning to work with new faces, was a weekend I'm not going to forget. And now.... I present our game: