A couple of weeks ago was the game jam GBJAM12, where you have to make a game with some of the Game Boy Color limitations like 4 colors only, a resolution of 160x144 pixels, etc (more details on the jam page), and with a friend of mine, Esteban, we decided to participate. The theme was Spooky and our idea was to make some kind of dance dance revolutions with zombies, inspired by Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Our game is named Dance Zombie Dance, and you have to help Michael Johnson to complete the dance sequence to make the dancing zombies happy and don’t eat him alive.


Click to play

Before joining this jam I asked myself if I should do it or not. One of the main reasons for doing small games and participating in game jams last year was to find a game to work on but now that I have Ship Miner I have to consider if the other reasons are important enough for me compared to investing time in my game.

These could be a list of reasons I might consider when joining a game jam:

  • Test and find new game ideas and maybe end up with the next game to make.
  • Challenge myself to do something new or something in a different way. This could be the idea, a technical challenge, a change in the process, among other things.
  • If working with a team, test how well we work together, how we distribute responsibilities, do we have synergy? do we want to work together again in the future?
  • Take some fresh air by stop doing what I do everyday. This also helps to return to the day to day stuff with renewed energies and motivated, and even with new ideas.
  • In the case of some game jams, the best rated games might reach some news sites, streamers, etc, and that could benefit developers by getting attention and visibility.
  • Be part of the game jam community or a specific game jam community, in my case I am a kind of fan of the GBJAM and like to join it each year.
  • And not less important than the other things: Have Fun.

I can’t know beforehand the value of each reason, it is something I can only evaluate after joining the game jam but what I know is I want to invest time in them every once in a while and I also know that I normally end up feeling fulfilled.

So, I will share some of my conclusions of participating in this game jam this year.

As I said before, we decided to make something we never did before, a musical game inspired by Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolutions but for Game Boy. So here we had the challenge of processing the music in a way we can show it in the game as part of the game mechanics. In order to do this, we exported both an mp3 and a midi file, and we processed the midi file to get the time where the notes should be shown to the player. Processing that was a bit complex but we managed to do it but games that depend on exact timing need a lot of tuning to make them feel as good as possible and that was something that we couldn’t achieve in the end :sweat_smile: (also browsers behave a bit different). That was a weakness and for that it got scored of 3.25 of 5 in gameplay and was placed #125 of 397.

For Esteban making retro music that sounds good for Game Boy was new and something to learn and experiment during the jam. The good thing here is that we were inspired by Thriller and the idea was to make some kind of adaptation of that song to be played so we didn’t have to create a song from 0. We ended up doing two songs, Thriller and Goosebumps, and they matched the theme really well. The game was placed #22 in Soundtrack/SFX with a score of 4.185 of 5 so we are pretty happy with that result.

Another thing we decided was that I was going to make the art for the game, even though I never did art for Game Boy before, I really liked the idea to challenge myself in this aspect, more now that I am doing the art for Ship Miner myself. The idea was to have the zombies and the main character looking to the camera and show different dance steps inspired by Thriller. The UI should be clear enough, showing the notes coming and when you correctly play them, etc, and considering we have only 4 colors it was a real challenge. In this case, we also managed to get a score of 4.185 of 5 and that placed us #70 in graphics :open_mouth:. Again, super happy with this result and how the game ended up looking.

Part of the jam consist in play and rate other games during the rating phase, after the submission, and takes around 2 weeks. Playing other games takes time but it is really interesting, some of them are better in one aspect and others in another and that learning experience inspires me a lot for future games. Rating and writing a review helps in interacting with the other devs and be part of the community and also in getting attention so other devs rate and review your game.

The other ratings are Gameboy Soul and Interpretation of the Secondary theme (spooky). We got 3.815 of 5 for the first one and 4.15 of 5 for the other which is great, I suppose :relaxed:.

The game got a good overall score of 3.919 of 5 and it was placed #55 of 397 entries :metal: but didn’t get to the top for streamers and news sites to consider talking about it. In general this game jam is not so visible compared to other jams but it is a solid one in my opinion, all the games are really good.

Click here to check all the results and the best rated games, and here to see our results.

In the end, we had fun and enjoyed thinking and converting in this idea into a game :muscle:. I tested the tools and adapted the process to make a different game, and we learned new stuff and we are really proud of the results. We also learned from our mistakes and we have that knowledge to apply for future game jams.

Thats all, thanks for reading :pray:.