This weekend I attended TOJam — an independent Toronto-based game jam that’s been going for ten years now! For anyone not familiar, you (alone or as part of a team) get three days to create a game that adheres to a certain theme. At the end, everyone eats pizza and goes around playing each others games. It’s a great challenge and lots of fun.

This year’s theme was “it’s all come to this”. My game is about a medieval city under attack by aliens. You defend and push a weapon to a vantage point where you use it to make a one-time shot. I called the game ‘Spur’. Here’s a time-lapse video of me creating it, followed by a quick play-through!

(You may notice the resolution changes a few times in the video — a monitor failure forced me to work on a Cintiq screen for a bit, and I had to go home to work on the animation. I don’t animate well unless I’m in front of a mirror, and am preferably not in front of strangers haha.)

You can check out Spur and other games from TOJam 10 on itch.io!

 

Finally, a couple people told me that they really enjoyed how the gameplay felt, so I thought I’d briefly touch on a couple tricks I believe contributed to this. Some are obvious, like screen shake, sprite flashing and particle effects. Possibly a little more subtle is hit-lag and animation timing.

Here are the animation frames for the sword swing. I think having a long beginning and end with a quick middle helps give the attack weight and power, especially when combined with…

…hit-lag! That’s what I call it, anyways. This gif has been slowed down to half speed to make it more obvious, but the game lags for a few frames whenever you hit an enemy. I’ve seen many games use this, but it’s not always easy to tell unless you’re looking for it.

 

I guess that’s about all I have to say on the topic! Congrats to everyone who participated in TOJam 10, hopefully we’ll be celebrating TOJam 20 before we know it!