Gamejams
A Gamejam is an event where a group of creatives gets together and builds a video game from the ground up within a limited amount of time, like 48 hours. Programming, art, and music in all. I have been participating in Game Jams as a hobby and creative exercise since 2019. I really enjoy it and hope to participate in a small, independent game project someday.
Bubbles Come Home:
Global Game Jam 2025
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Oh no! You, Bubbles, the mild-morning neighborhood hamster, have been kidnapped! Not only that, but the evil Dr.Nefarious has experiments on you, making you GIANT!
Can you get home to your little girl?... without destroying the whole town? -
In Bubbles Come Home you play Bubbles, the giant hamster on his way to find his home again. The only problem, is you are more than a little clumsy.
You have a limited amount of time to get home and for SOME reason someone is tracking the sheer amount of property damage you cause.
The play for this game is rather open. Do you want to cause the MOST destruction on your way home or the LEAST? This is really left up to the player. In the end, you just need to find your home.. and honestly it is really fun to smash things.
We even opened up an optional 2 player where you can race to find the house first OR you can both just smash and smash to your little hamster's heart's content. -
For the first time, I actually created a fully illustrated narrative opening for this game. It is in a sort of comic book / 90s cartoon sort of overall vibe. I looked at cartoons like Phineas and Ferb and some villains from the Hanna-Barbarra era for inspiration overall for all of our characters and had a lot of fun trying to make a short, silly but compelling story come to life with illustration (My husband did a great job writing it!)
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Bubbles Come Home had started out as a fun family project between our programmer, Brian, and his daughter and we decided it would be fun to build upon it with professionals and semi-professionals that go to game jams. On the left, you can see the early stages of the game where I laid out ideas for the overall design of the UI and other elements so Brian could build with that in mind until I was able to finish off all of the assets.
Things are kind of blurry, right?
'I actually did that on purpose. Overall I wanted to try and capture the bright colors and eye strain that came from playing video games or watching cartoons on an aged CRT TV in your Grandma's garage. There was something so retro about this project overall I fell in love with the concept!
I ended up playing this game with some of my students and they had a lot of fun nearly immediately breaking the game by making the master fly off the map. But they really enjoyed the explosions and overall sound design so it was a win-win for sure.
Cult of Cat:
Nordic Game Jam 2024
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Somehow.. and you are not sure how you have found yourself part of a cult... a cult of cats. You have two options try and find an ally to escape with or accuse another of blasphemy to get the attention away from yourself.
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Cult of Cat is a game of deception and choice. Two players are faced with a choice, do they want to try and blend in or do they want to try and convince others that they fit seamlessly into the cult?
You will each choose a question that the cult leader will ask the rest of the group. You then need to answer the questions posed by the other player and the others present.
At the end of the question rounds, you will be given a choice. You will choose a cult member from those around you and have two options. To either try and escape with them or accuse them of blasphemy to the rest of the cult.
You have no clue what the other person will choose so there are many options for endings, some good and some terrible... for you or the other person. -
For this game, I worked on UI, the design of the characters, and the stained glass windows in the temple. I also did some of the 3d sculpting of some background elements like the statues but my larger focus was on the characters.
I was trying to go for a sort of stained glass woodblock print design overall and I think in some ways it was very successful and others.. not so much. Overall I do really like the cult leader. He is a very neat design and I for sure made our composer pose for reference.
The mix of 3d and 2d elements is very interesting and I think with just a little more time for lighting and possibly fog effects we could have made it just a little more visually compelling. -
I think I made some risky decisions with Cult of Cat that did not completely pay off but I did like some things about it. It was a fun little experience and worth a little attempt at the slow gameplay.
ALL HAIL CATS!
Trago[at]s:
Global Game Jam 2024
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Your village is in danger of a vengeful god, you are the noble sacrifice, and all you have to do is make the god laugh to save your people. Easy... right?
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Tragoats is a mix between a platformer, speed running... Madlib. As you reach the end of a platform you are faced with a choice of three words. The word you choose will lead to a new platform.
You must scale the new platform and find the next mystery chest of words before you run out of time and face the wrath of the god who stares down at you from above.
Each platform has its own challenges from speed, hidden spaces, and distance to finding the chest and you only have so much time.
Each time you choose a word it will be added to a story at the end of the game in a classic MadLib format creating an amusing story for the god. Pay no attention to the blood-stained sacrificial platform. -
Tragoats was a really fun time to design. Having a limited amount of time for a jam and having finally figured out texturing with my limited resources I opted to do things in a messy sort of scribbly art style. I wanted all the shapes to be exaggerated and clear and overall have a very childish aesthetic.
Our Player character turned out completely adorable. He is meant to be a goat, specifically a SCAPE goat. To play with the whole idea of sacrifice. I wanted to find this nice middle place between an actual goat and some of the characters from A Goofy Movie in the design. Trying to hit that sort of amorphous "animal" character rather than something like a furry.
For the god, I actually modeled him after a Swedish king, specifically Gustaf II Adolf who always had these really intense lacy collar and just... REALLY interesting hair.
We wanted to have the eyes follow the player around the map so I really wanted to exaggerate their shapes and colors and the idea was eventually to have a model of the actual god's head as well but we never quite got that far.
Then the platforms were modeled after a bunch of random words we created to fill in our Madlib sort of system. Then I constructed them from scratch and actually re-used some of the modes from SARO and the failed Cat's Eye extension project. Work smart, not hard. Right? -
All and All I am very proud of the end product of Tragoats. The game is fun to play, the character is animated and the sound effects are incredibly funny. The actual game takes a little explaining but also it is just fun to run and jump around in the different environments. I really feel like I leveled up my technical and design skills on this game and I highly suggest giving it a playthrough.
Saro
Nordic Game Jam 2023
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You are a little boy whose family has recently gone through something terrible. You wander through the garage at night, trying to make sense of your life while a monster haunts you from the shadows.
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In Saro, you are a young boy wandering around in the dark trying to find something in the garage at night. As you find things you unlock different thoughts and memories and how you process and handle that information affects the end of the story.
The whole time you are moving through a dark entity is following you around in the darkness. Something spooky, old, and out to get you as some sort of dread. -
Boy
For the design of the boy, I was really wanting to lean into a sort of Hanna Barbarra style. It took several sketches but eventually, I settled into shapes I could model in 3D with some success.
Dragon
For the dragon, on the other hand, I wanted there to be something insidious and not "cool" about it so I actually looked at the artwork of dragons depicted in artwork like illuminated manuscripts back when they were never considered good guys or anti-heroes but were seen as evil agents of the devil. I even gave it a forked tongue to lead to this very bad thing in the dark vibes.
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2024 was the year I finally figured out my texturing issues! Well, sorta. I had figured out a way to slip the model and mesh into the program Procreate and color it there to export back into Unity as a completed art piece. There were still some functional issues where for some reason the mesh did not line up exactly right at some angles or distances but it was a GameJam, you are going to have some small issues
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Now THIS is something I am incredibly proud of with this project and something that was hugely appreciated by the other programmers and artists at the Gamejam.
I was still struggling with figuring out how to get textures onto models I created so I decided to completely throw that out the window and create models with no plan for texturing them at all. I ended up making twenty-eight individual models for this game.
But what was the visual plan? LIGHTING! The plan was to use three different light sources at three different angles of magenta, cyan, and yellow casting shadows in different tones giving the allusion to color, and adding a really cool and spooky mood to the whole thing.
ON TOP of that we created a "flashlight" fog of war over the whole game by creating a textured flat plain that moved with the character creating a sort of drawn effect to the pointed light. Please watch the video below and see how actually cool that looked!
OMG Y2K!
Nordic Game Jam 2022
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You and your best friend were planning on having a normal New Year's evening playing Yu-Gi-Oh and listening to N'Sync when something terrible happened. The timeline splits, and one of you is trapped where Y2K actually happened, and the other is not! Solve puzzles together to find the missing Windows 97 startup disk and save the day.
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OMG, Y2K If a point-and-lick escape room where you are clicking around the room in search of clues. After a certain amount of clicks, you are thrust into the other dimension where things are a little different and you need to combine what you know from both situations to solve all of the clues and find the fabled Windows reboot disk to reset reality.
The whole time you are moving through a dark entity is following you around in the darkness. Something spooky, old, and out to get you as some sort of dread. -
I had a TON of fun designing this game. The overall concept was to capture what it felt like to be a pre-teen in the year 2000. I used notebook paper motifs for most of the UI and added all sorts of doodles and things that screamed being in middle school at the time. I even filled the room with SO many flashback items. Like posters of musicians. Cork boards with magazine cutouts, THAT unicorn poster, inflatable chairs, fluffy journals, alien stickers and so so so much more. This was really a love letter to that time period.
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So the lighting was in the end that most people became obsessed with playing with. I had actually created a very basic 3d model of the room in Nomad Sculpt and moved light sources around to create a pretty accurate example of how the lights would work and kept with the pencil-drawn aesthetic so it fit in. You could click on the lamp, the computer, and the TV to turn off and on the various lights, and a lot of people during the playtesting showcase wasted their clicks on this.
Also when you clicked the radio music would play and when you clicked the TV a sort of Power Rangers-esque tune would play. -
For the Y2K map, I took the same model and turned lots of things upside down and chopped them up so I could do another lighting effect of lightning through the hole in the roof. This was meant to flash with a sound and add to a general feeling of unease when you are on this side of the universe. The lightning flash never made it into the game but I like the ominous feeling it added next to the bright happy colors of its counterpart.
