GameJam @ Uni-Ulm

A few weeks ago, my friends Daniel, Emilian and I participated in the first ever Uni Ulm GameJam. It was a 48-hour jam which was accompanied by many talks about Game Design and Development. We arrived there at Friday afternoon, and after a short introduction, the topic “It never ends” was announced. We then started right in with brainstorming and, after some time, came up with a funny little game idea: The idea is based on the endlessly typing monkey theorem. Basically, you have to navigate a spaceship around some astroids and you have to try to collect coins. The trick is that you can only use the spaceship instructions (such as driving left or shoot) which are supplied by your monkeys. These three monkeys are your crew members and can be equipped with three spaceship instructions each. The monkeys then randomly give you one instruction of these. This might sound a little complex at first but I assure you it’s very easy to play. So, I invite you to try it out yourself later on.

After brainstorming, we started coding. It took us the whole rest of Friday for the basic game structure. After a surprisingly refreshing rest, we worked through the whole Saturday and managed to get the game playable the same evening. We even had enough time to visit a talk about World Generation Techniques which was quite interesting. Thankfully, there was a free supply of drinks and coffee which also had a large influence on the positive outcome of our game.

On Sunday, we had to round up our game and make it also visually appealing. In the end, we were quite happy with the result and could hand in the game without big of a hurry. The whole event was finished off with the presentations of all teams. It was very interesting to see how other teams interpreted the theme and we were also very glad to see that our game could compete well with the other ones. The actual rating of the game was done afterwards via itch.io.

In the end, our game ended up with the following positions:

We are quite happy with this result as we expected our game to be the strongest in the category game logic while the other games were stronger in the graphic area.

Overall, it was a very nice experience as it was very intense to code under such a time pressure. Also, it was very cool to have such an in-person-experience and have the ability to talk to other teams and enhance your skills by attending some talks. We will definitely join the next Uni Ulm GameJam again!

Last but not least, here’s the link to our itch.io project page:

https://kastanileel.itch.io/monkeys-and-typewriters

You can run the game in the browser so have a try and let us know what you think about it! Until next time and game on!