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Global Game Jam 2025

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By Jacob Hans
10 min read

Global Game Jam 2025

Theme: Bubble

Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve done a game jam. March of last year is the last game jam I participated in and I think I’ve been subconsciously itching for it. I saw a post from my local game dev community that there would be a Global Game Jam site near me. I have been in my own little bubble of Godot Wild Jam and working only with people I already know. I thought that this time I would expand my horizons, open up my bubble and meet some new like-minded people in person. Wow what an amazing experience that was. I went in without having much expectations, other than having another awesome game to add to my portfolio and make some friends along the way. Also, this was only a 48 hour jam which is not something I had done before. I thought this would be a unique challenge as the only other game jams I had done took place over 9 days which means I had plenty of time to think and expand and develop.

During this process I knew I wanted to write up a retrospective for a game jam so I decided to take some notes and reflect each day during the jam to document the experience. So I thought I would share some of those reflections with you here.

24 Jan 2025 Day 1: Pre-arrival thoughts

I’m very interested in meeting some new people and people that are like minded in creating video games. I haven’t really reached out into this social sphere before so this will be exciting and new. At the moment, I am very interested in working with a team of 2-3 total people. I’d like to stick to my strengths of 2D pixel art style because that’s where I feel most comfortable.

I would also like to stick with Godot at this time because I know I can move quick and reuse some interfaces from other projects. I will not be making any music, but I am interested in recording some sound effects. I’d really like to see what I can do in just a couple of days and maybe meet some people that share views and values.

24 Jan 2025 Day 1: Post festivity thoughts

Lots of new perspectives and people and personalities I would’ve never met before. Lots of ideas and concepts and tools I hadn’t thought of before. Lots of things that made me uncomfortable, but I am able to sit in that uncomfortability. Lots of fishing in the pond, but I found someone to match my personality and thought processes.

We’re going to make something I haven’t done much with before and that will be okay. While I was adamant on 2D to continue practicing my strengths, we are doing something 3D in Godot to open up my world view of game dev. Fun times agead and new experiences to unfold.

I had found someone that I clicked with well and knew we could make something great together. He had never worked with Godot before, and it has been close to 6 or 7 years since I worked with 3D in games. So this ended up being the perfect compromise where we would use Godot, but make something in 3D which ended up proving to be a really amazing experience. To be frank, I left the first day without much drive or passion as I wasn’t fully invested in the theme of bubble nor the overall progress we had made for the first day. I came home thinking “I don’t really care much what we get done here, I’m mostly here for the experience and working with new people”. The whole idea was based on super monkey ball, a game I vaguely knew and hadn’t really watched much gameplay of. So before I went up to bed, I watched a short gameplay video to get an idea of what we could make.

Then I hopped in the shower and something switched on in my brain. The sudden rush and excitment of a game jam. Suddenly the pressure became real and the ideas began flowing in my head. My adrenaline started pumping and I wrote out a whole slough of ideas on my phone.

Things to get done:

  • Main menu
  • Bathtub scene (area 3D pop bubbles)
  • GUI with timer and health
  • Health mechanic
  • Death mechanic (falling off stage)
  • Tile environment
  • Agglomerative bubble mechanic
  • Skybox
  • Different stage difficulty things
    • moving platform
  • Different stages
  • Bubble pop sound effect
  • Different text depending on how many bubbles made it into the bath
    • bubble party
    • average bath
    • bubble bath extravaganza
  • Textures for level
  • Bubble particle effect
  • Bubble shader effect

The game - SUPER BUBBLE BATH 3D

Then I went to bed excited as ever (the normal curse of the game jam) and ready to roll bright and early the next morning.

25 Jan 2025 Day 2: Huge efforts and long strides

Lots of amazing progress. Lots of great new friendships formed. Lots of snacks eaten.

Really cool experience working on 3D and really cool experience getting something done and polished in a hyper short timeframe. I felt like we’ve really been able to knock something well polished out in such a short time. Excited to see what tomorrow brings and excited to get something submitted!

It’s also hard not to steamroll certain things and just get stuff done. We have such a small timeframe so you sort of have to trust each other to get something cool done and working and out the door. Though I did sort of take it upon myself to do a lot of the visual direction, but that was originally met with welcome arms so I won’t feel bad about it.

I have once again worked myself super hard and I have no chill. But I think that means this is what I’m meant to be doing because I have never had such a drive and passion for anything else in my life that would force me to non stop think about and work on for a full 48 hours straight. Super cool man.

By the end of the first full day of working, I had already formed a really strong bond with someone I had just met less than 24 hours prior. Not only would I be learning a lot about different tools, and how to once again work with that dreaded 3rd dimension space, I was continuing to flex my networking abilities and seek out like-minded individuals.

By this point, we got to experience practicing giving our pitch to a group of 30ish people and giving a play demo to the group a mere 24 hours into making the game. It was the first time I had ever pitched and presented a game I had worked on to a group of strangers and the experience was surreal. People complimented us and lit up with ideas when they saw what we had accomplished. It was something of a dream, really.

By this point, I knew exactly where our game was headed and what was left to complete. I proceeded to head home and continue working until about 3 am as I found some free music to use in the game and recorded myself making a bubble pop sound effect and cleaning it up in Audacity. By this point in the night, we had a full game loop, main menu, pause menu, and end game scene. We had a game, and that is what I find most important - having something to submit. This allowed us to spend the remaining time the final day adding polish, additional levels, and play testing.

26 Jan 2025 Day 3: The final push

Welp, we did it. The Game Jam is over and I have a new game under my belt and in the portfolio. What a super cool experience to go in person and see exactly how I shape up compared to others. It’s very interesting to see just how vast the creative approaches are to these jams and in how people process challenges such as this. I felt like I haven’t really found that sort of community quite yet of people to bust their ass in the name of making something that matters to them and a game they can be so proud of to put their name to. What an electric atmosphere that creates and what a catalyst to drive my passion for my personal projects. I really feel like I’ve found a new community and extension of myself to continue to grow technically and as a human. Super thankful and grateful that I took part in the experience and can’t wait to see what this year has in store for my game dev journey.

But for now, running on 4 hours of sleep and mostly just dinner, I must go to bed and recharge for the week ahead. Vi ses mina vänner, hej.

We finished our game and submitted it to itch. That is the goal and we accomplished it. Not only that, but we also got the fun experience of showcasing the game we accomplished to the group on a big stage and had a lot of people approach us afterward to talk about it and give it a play. That was something that I will keep with me forever, a token and reminder that this is something for me and something I am good at.

Some cool tools and new things I learned about from fellow participants and organizers were about:

It had also been awhile since I have worked with physical hardware - something I used to do quite often actually. So having someone there to nerd out with resparked some of those interests with hardware and game me some additional ideas of other fun projects I could do in the future to bridge my interests of game dev with hardware.

Overall, I would 100% do this again (and I am planning to). I learned a lot about myself and gained some additional confidence in my ability to connect with people, communicate, and make something awesome. I also got to explore the swath of options and node types within Godot that I have never touched before and it showed me that there is a lot you can do with some basic primitives and some imagination, they really do go a long way.

You can find the GGJ page here if you’d like to play.

I hope to be doing maybe one or two more game jams this year to continue to challenging myself and opening up my creative horizons and skillsets. So hopefully stay tuned for some other retrospective posts in the future on that. Once again, thank you for spending some time with me here, and I wish you all the best.

“I only want to make games that I want to play because I have to play it more than anyone else” - Jacob

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