Over the weekend I helped organize, and participated in Global Game Jam over at Let’s Games! Tokyo. I helped make a game called ‘What is it Like to be a Bubble’. I’m proud of my team, and also what the other teams at our site accomplished. You can see all the games on our site’s demo video:
Team Peaceful Bubble
This year, I was glad to find other PICO-8 enthusiasts at the site to team up with. Josh (acedio) and Shane worked on a PICO-8 game at last year’s Global Game Jam. Eric (kitasuna) has made PICO-8 games at the last 2 Global Game Jams, and runs a vlog about some of his PICO-8 experiments. Douglas was new to PICO-8, but picked it up quickly.
I’m certainly not new to PICO-8, but what was new for me was working in PICO-8 with a team. Other PICO-8 games I’ve made have been with at most one other person. Other game jams where I’ve worked in a team of 3+ people have used Unity or Unreal.
I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly our team of 5 was able to collaborate without stepping on each others’ toes. There were a few times we had merge conflicts in the spritesheet, which were somewhat hard to resolve, but thankfully that didn’t take up too much of our time. It was more common to have merge conflicts in the code, and those were straightforward to resolve.
Making a Shmup
This year, it felt like the hardest part of the jam was deciding on what to make. The theme for the jam was ‘bubble’, which is thankfully open to plenty interpretations, but is also less helpful in picking a direction.
We settled on making a shmup, as both a genre that our team members had an interest in, and something that could be reasonably executed on within 48 hours. It may be more accurate to say a shmup inspired game. Our game has no shooting, which reduced our development scope, and seemed to fit the theme more nicely. We wanted our player to feel floaty and fragile like a bubble, not powerful like a fighter ship.
Without the shooting part, our gameplay focuses on dodging bullets, and collecting pickups. I think it worked out well. Even with just those mechanics we were able to make an interesting challenge for players. Bullets and pickups working together to create push/pull tension.
We’re in Space
I made a lot of “scattered” contributions to the game: the credits page, the label image, sound effects, and little bits of code. But the part I’m most proud of is the music. Within a couple of hours of posting our game on itch.io, I already got a very flattering comment about the games’ music.
I wrote two short songs for the game: Liftoff and Zero-G. The first one has a pensive mood. The second is more going for dance-club vibes — something the player can get into flow to. I think both sound pretty space-y.
One of the challenges of writing Zero-G was trying to mimic the way sidechain compression sounds using the sfx tracker. It turns out that writing the drum part the way I would notate it on staff paper ends up sounding wrong to me. Instead I shifted the drum part back by a 32nd note, so it starts just before the beat. This means there’s a slight rhythm shift between the A section and B section of the song that sounds a little bit wonky to me, but I’m not sure how noticeable it is.
Check it out
You can check out our game, ‘What is it Like to be a Bubble’ over on itch.io. It’s playable right in your browser.