As I do every year, I attended global game jam in Hamar this year once again, along with my partner and some friends from our studies. it's become a tradition to travel back to Hamar every year for GGJ, and it's always so much fun to see people again and all the wacky things all participants make.

This year's GGJ theme was "Mask", but Hamar also has a local theme which was "Hand made" this year. We opted to use the local theme, as it was the idea we liked the most, though we did have some ideas for the official theme too.

Our idea was originally going to revolve around the player controlling a hand walking around on it's fingers, fighting other hands to gain points. These fingers were supposed to be pictures of actual hands and animated through a sprite sheet, but as we had a majority of artists on the group we opted to make models and animate them instead.

Some time in the beginning was spent trying to figure out how to make the game. Some mild prototyping and joking around with VFX before we settled on a rock paper scissors game with some secret ultimate moves to make it mor funny. I originally wanted to use time making sounds, music, shaders and particle effects to practice more on those parts. I did do all of that, but in the end there was of course some more programming I had to do.

I had barely touched shaders and particles since the first year of my bachelor, so I was incredibly rusty. Luckily some great youtube tutorials helped getting me up to speed. As we had the secret moves of "Gun" and "Bomb", I wanted the result of these moves to be way more flashy and over the top when compared to the regular moves.

For the Bomb, I made a nuclear mushroom using Unity's basic particle system with some simple models I whipped up in Blender. The animation on the bomb itself is just colors, simple noise and vertex displacement over time. And some emission and lighting to make the result look... well.. nuclear.

The Gun had a laser which would just beam the other player, disintigrating them. I made this using Unity's VFX graph, which let me layer multiple particle systems into one, as well as making a couple basic shaders in the shader graph. I did end up having to code the rock paper scissors AND the special combo system, as the programmer in charge was having issues making it work, but it worked out well in the end.

Lastly I made a custom shader for the background which was 1 shaded object with scrolling noise split in 2 down the middle, with each side scrolling opposite eachother and with different colors. It took some time managing to split the UV and making each side scroll right with Multiply, Lerp and reverse Lerpm but in the end it came out looking pretty nice!

In the beginning, I wanted to make the music of the game purely with mout noises. But, with me being fairly rough at making music, anything I made either sounded too bad or was so off tempo that it was just awful.

I ended up using BeepBox, like I had for Limb-O! in 2024, and ended up making a stressful french sounding beat that weirdly fit the vibe of the game. All the other sounds in the game are "Acapella" though, with me and my partner making swishing and crushing sounds into our phones and then adding reverb, bass and pitch correcting it to make some really funny sounds.

All in all it was a really fun time, and I had a great time. Already looking forward to next year!