A couple of days ago I participated in my first Gamejam on Retrograde Jam 3.
This Gamejam was a 10-day game jam hosted by Programancer with an emphasis on simulating the 8-bit/16-bit era! Low resolution, small palettes, chiptunes, and everything that made gaming in the early 90s great!
The Gamejam run from July 1st, 2022 to the end of July 10th, 2022
The idea of joining a Gamejam always intrigued me especially as I picked up learning Godot for the past 5 months working on small games and as finally, Summer time arrived I decided to join one with my friend Efefsok.
We decided to go with a Gameboy platform jumping game as the limitations of the GameBoy and especially the green color palette was liked by both of us.
We wanted the game to be somewhat close to games such as Jump King and games like Google’s Whirlybird as they were both skill-based and fun.
We went for a slime/jungle-based design on the game and decided to call it SlopyJump based on the player character that we named “Slopy”.
The objective of the game was to jump through all the platforms to reunite Slopy with his friends at the top of the game!
The Game also had a twist by having a boss fight in the middle of the game and if you got killed you would have to return to the start. No checkpoints.
We went with a kind of weird concept which I haven’t seen done before which was with having the player not be able to damage the boss but instead it had to dodge all the bullets from the boss and go on the pressure plates of the turrets which in result fired and damaged the boss and after all of the turrets were fired the boss was defeated!
The last part of the Game that we needed was Music.
I made some nice effects for the game using LMMS’s FreeBoy which is an emulator of the Game Boy audio processing unit (APU) but when it comes to music for the menu and ending I couldn’t make anything.
So I went to Google to find music for the GameBoy that I could use.
Then I stumbled on a Reddit thread by the user valdezv666 in which he was sharing free music tracks for projects and games https://www.reddit.com/r/gbstudio/comments/irnaa0/gb_studio_tracks_vol_1_3_free_music_tracks_free/ I was thrilled! I downloaded the songs to listen to them and they were exactly what I was looking for and they synced with the game perfectly!
After that, I applied them to the game and after 8 days and 10 hours we had our finished game! Which in my opinion turned out really well.
If you want to give it a try you can download it here
