So the Bacon Game Jam happened last weekend, we started with no background in games development, and little experience with git (specifically merge conflicts for me). For those of you who don’t know what the Bacon Game Jam is, it’s a 48 hour challenge to build a working game with a specific theme. The theme is only announced at the start so teams don’t get a head start.

The theme for 06 was rainbows.

We started by coming up with a general idea:
Have a drunk leprechaun stumbling down a pavement and have him have to avoid obstacles such as people. The leprechaun would have to go into pubs and drink coloured drinks to level up. At the end the leprechaun would throw up on an enemy “or something”.

After the first 24 hours we only had a pavement and a 4 leaf clover which could be controlled by the keyboard. We started to simplify our idea by getting rid of the pub part. We then needed to decided how the leprechaun would level up, and we decided that it would be time based, with him having to throw up on the obstacles in order to destroy them and gain points.

Overall the whole experience was great, we had to deal with git merge errors which we were all new to, and we had to pickup a new java library in a few hours. The library we used was libgdx, which is quite powerful considering with a few extra lines of code our game could be ported to android and IOS, and it already works with all desktop operating systems.

Considering there were only three of us and none of us were graphic designers, games developers or had any experience with the library we chose to use, I believe our result was great!

If you’re interested in playing the game, here’s the Bacon Game Jam page. If you’re interested in the code, here’s the GitHub Repository.