2026-09-21
Last weekend, some friends and I participated in OCSS' Game Jam of 2026. With the theme of 'Evolution', we had the unique position of applying our small but growing game development experience to make something that could be enjoyable to both the judges and other contestants. What could go wrong?
During the first day we had many ambitious game ideas that we were sure we would have the time to implement (we did not). Our game would be one where the player navigates a level that has certain areas that cannot be accessed due to the trait the player's character had. So in order to progress, the player must defeat other lower-species of fish to earn evolution points to evolve their character. They can then evolve to have more favourable traits that may assist in completing the level. During the first day however, we were only able to implement the movement, AI and entity attributes. It was not looking good in completing the deadline but we had two tricks up our sleeves. Firstly we had initially registered our team as a group of four people however, we knew that one of our members would be unavailable during the first day so we were counting on them helping us chip away at the large backlog in day two. Also considering our progress after day one, everyone in our team stayed up during most of the night to implement essential core features that were needed to have something that could be presented at the deadline.
It was crunch time. With our game in a state that looked like an almost-blank Unity project, we came to the venue in the morning to find out that our ace card; the fourth member, was a no-show. We were able to get a friend last-minute to help with some of the art, and thanks to the hours our team members put in overnight, our game has started to look presentable. During this last day we added functionality where the player can actually choose their attributes to purchase. At this point we started working on the level design however, this is where we hit a large roadblock. We suddenly had a merge conflict that we could not figure out. We later learn about Unity's merge tool but that was done after the game jam had concluded. Because of this we used our final hour of the game jam trying to resolve this conflict and move the main branch back to a working state. We quickly rushed together an empty level that will generate random entities for the player to fight against and built the game ready for submission.
After the deadline passed our build kept on crashing on our development machines. We spent a while trying to debug this and make our game moe efficient to work in the browser and eventually gave up and just made a native Windows build and have players come play it in person. We'll come to find later that the build just didn't work on our machines for some reason yet worked on other contestants machines. During the moments after the deadline we encountered many problems that could have been easily solved with little tweaks and balancing that we did not have time to complete in during the game jam. These tweaks have been since updating in the current live build of the game however, if you were to check the commit history you will be able to see our panic in these rapid updates after the deadline time had passed.
The game is available currently at this link or the event website. Thanks to the organisers and their sponsors for putting together this event, as well as the judges for offering their time for both mentorship and critiquing. Well done to NS for their amazing submission as well as well done to all the other contestants that participated. Our group had a blast.
Also thanks to the other members in our group; Zane Osborne and Patrick Gray.
- Happy Fishing