A Jingle Jam Game Jam

We did another game jam!

(You can play it for free below)

It's the end of the year, and we all liked the idea of taking a break and doing something new and exciting. The Jingle Jam Game Jam was last week, and it seemed like the perfect excuse for us all to unwind and get creative again.

If you are unaware of the Jingle Jam Charity event, make sure you check it out here. It's an amazing charity livestream event, hosted by The Yogscast, where you can get a bunch of cool games whilst supporting a bunch of cool charities.

To support game development whilst raising money for charity, the Yogscast have been hosting a Game Jam as part of the 2-week event, which we were excited to take part in. If you are new to the idea of Game Jams, you are given a creative prompt and a short deadline to create a brand new game. It is a fun way to bring game dev communities and hobbyists together to make new games and test new ideas.

The prompt this year was "If you can't beat them, join them", open enough to allow a lot of variety, whilst restrictive enough to encourage our creativity. So, of course, we instantly went with a pun and changed the word "Beat" to "Beet" - since Jack loves The Office and references Dwight Schrute as much as he can.

Introducing DeadBeet - a zombie, wave-based survival game (loosely inspired by the film 300) where you must join the Beets to fight off waves of the undead. If a zombie farmer tragically bites a Beet, they become an Undead Beet, or Zombeet if you will, and join the hordes attacking the level.

The game cannot be won; the fun is surviving as long as you can. Each time the beet you are controlling dies, you can take over control of another Beet and rejoin the front lines, assuming there are any left, of course!

We not only had a lot of fun creating this short game, but we also learnt valuable lessons.

DeadBeet is a multiplayer game, something we've always been unsure about creating, so Rob has had an entire week of practice and experience in learning network programming and all its pitfalls.

Lee got plenty of new Unity experience as we not only used a newer version of Unity that we've not really used before, but Lee also got a lot more hands-on experience in importing assets, making prefabs and having fun creating an engaging environment with the limited selection of assets that Jack was able to whip up.

And last but not least, Jack discovered how to turn Voxel assets (which he already knows how to make from Coloring Voxels) into usable 3D models with low poly counts for a more animated and engaging game world than we've developed with voxel art before.

DeadBeet isn't without its bugs; the networking has a few issues, and we weren't able to implement the end-of-game scoreboard we wanted, which would show how many kills each Beet managed to get before being overrun. We are still very proud of our week-long creation, and a last-minute change to the Graphics API to fix a crashing problem meant we managed to get the final build uploaded with just a minute to spare!

We hope you will enjoy playing it as much as we have!

You can play it now for free! Check out the itch.io page here: https://toastielabs-rob.itch.io/deadbeet All you need to do is click "download" and launch DeadBeet.exe from the folder you receive.

Please let us know your thoughts and opinions by leaving a comment on the itch game page, and if you're one of the other cool devs who created a game for this year's Jingle Jam Game Jam, maybe consider leaving us a rating too!

With some charitable love - The ToastieLabs Team <3