Back in April I took part in another game jam! Specifically, I took part in the 46th Ludum Dare jam. This was my 2nd online game jam (3rd overall - in January I took part in GGJ with some cool people and made this using Unity)! The theme was “Keep It Alive”, and I once again worked solo using Ossium, my open source 2D game engine. I called the game “SPOF: Single Point Of Failure”, which ended up being a basic strategy-simulation game where you have to maintain and grow a global server network. You can check it out here!

Ludum Dare is a well designed online jam that has been around for quite some time now. One of the great things about it is that it encourages jammers to play other people’s games and give helpful feedback. Plus everyone is so positive! A major feature of the feedback system is ratings - there are several different categories to rate games on, from overall quality to innovation, art, sound design and so on. These ratings are averaged at the end to determine the overall ranking of a game. I was pretty pleased with how SPOF did, coming 600th out of 4959 submissions! Of course, my jam experience wasn’t without problems - Ossium still lacks some stability which caused some issues (such as the entity component system not being destroyed properly… eek!) but despite this, I managed to get a working game out the door. Once I rebuilt it and stuck all the DLLs in the zip that MinGW secretly requires anyway… the joys of C++ development :P

There are a lot of extra bits and pieces I would have added if I had time to do so, like sound effects and music, but sadly didn’t get done. Nonetheless, this was once again an enjoyable experience and I learned more because of it, while having a great time - which is the main thing :D

I hope you found this article interesting! If you want to learn more about Ossium, you can delve into the code on github.