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+---
+title: "Global Game Jam 2023 - GI Jam"
+date: "2023-02-11"
+last_edit: "2023-02-11"
+status: 2
+cover_image: "/assets/global_game_jam_2023/screen_shot_2.png"
+categories: gamedev
+---
+
+At the beginning of this month I participated in the Games Institutes's Global Game Jam event. [The Games
+Institute](https://uwaterloo.ca/games-institute/) is an organization at my local university 
+(The University of Waterloo), that focuses on games based research. Every school term they host a 
+game jam, and the one for this term happened to coincide with the Global Game Jam. Since this event was open
+to everyone (it's been a few years since I've been a student at UW 👴️), I joined up to try and stretch some
+of my more creative muscles. The event was a 48 hour game jam that went from the evening of Friday Feb 3rd 
+to Sunday Feb 5th.
+
+<div class="gallery">
+![](/assets/global_game_jam_2023/screen_shot_1.png)
+![](/assets/global_game_jam_2023/screen_shot_2.png)
+![](/assets/global_game_jam_2023/screen_shot_3.png)
+
+Screenshots of Turtle Roots
+</div>
+ 
+
+The game we created is called [Turtle Roots](https://globalgamejam.org/2023/games/turtle-roots-5), and it
+is a simple resource management game. You play as a magical turtle floating through the sky, that requires
+water to survive. The turtle can spend some of its "nutrients" to grow roots that will allow it to gather
+water and collect more nutrients. The challenge in the game is trying to survive for as long as possible without
+running out of water.
+
+## The Team
+
+I attended the event solo and quickly partnered up with two other people, who also attended solo. One member
+had already participated in a game jam before and specialized in art, while the other member was attending a
+game jam for the first time and was looking for the best way they could contribute, they turned out to have
+particular skills for sound, and ended up created all the audio in our game. This left me as the programmer for
+our team. 
+
+This also wasn't my first game jam, in 2021 I participated in a 
+[Nintendo 64 homebrew game jam](n64brew-gamejam-2021), in 2022 I joined the Puerto Rican Game Developers Association
+event for the global game jam, and we submitted [Magnetic Parkour](https://globalgamejam.org/2022/games/magnetic-parkour-6),
+I've also participated in [Ludum Dare](https://ldjam.com/) back in around 2013 but I've since lost the link to
+my submission. While in high school, and myself and friend participated in two years in a row that sort of worked
+like a game jam called "Ottawa Tech Jam" where we submitted [Zorv Warz](http://www.fastquake.com/projects/zorvwarz/)
+and [E410](http://www.fastquake.com/projects/worldseed/). As you can probably tell, I really like gamedev. The
+desire to build my own video games is actually what originally got me into programming. When I was around 14 years
+old I picked up a c++ programming book from the library, since I wanted to try to build my own game and I heard
+most game developers use c++. I recall using some proprietary game development library (that I can't recall the
+name of), that let you build 2D and 3D games in windows using C++. I didn't really get to far into it until
+high school when I started to learn SFML, SDL, and OpenGL. I also dabbled with Unity during that time as well.
+But I've always had a strong desire to build most of the foundation of the game myself without using an engine.
+You can see the desire really come out on the work I did for Zorv Warz, E410, and the N64 homebrew game jam.
+When working with a team I feel it can be a lot easier to use a game engine, even if it doesn't scratch the
+same itch for me.
+
+## The Tech Behind the Game
+
+Lately I've had a growing interest in the game engine called [Godot](https://godotengine.org/), and wanted to use
+this opportunity to learn the engine more and build a game in it. Godot is interesting to me as its a totally
+open source game engine, and as you can probably guess from my job ([](2022_igalia_graphics_team)), open source
+software as well as free software is something I'm particularly interested in.
+
+Godot is a really powerful game engine that handles a lot of complexity for you. For example it has a built
+in parallax background component, that we took advantage of to add more depth to our game. What this does is
+allow you to control the background scrolling speed for different layer of the background, giving the illusion
+of depth in a 2D game.
+
+Another powerful feature of Godot is its physics engine. Godot makes it really easy to create physics objects in
+your scene and have them do interesting stuff. You might be wondering where physics comes into play in our game,
+and we actually use it for the root animations. I setup a sort of "rag doll" system for the roots so they would
+flop around in the air as the player moves, really giving a lot more "life" to an otherwise static game.
+
+Godot has a built in scripting language called "GDScript" which is very similar to python. I've really grown to
+like this language. It has an optional type system you can take advantage of that helps with reducing the number
+of bugs that exist in your game. It also has great connectivity with the editor. This proved useful as I could
+"export" variables in the game and allow my team members to modify certain parameters of the game without knowing
+any programming. This is super helpful with balancing, and more easily allows non technical members of team to
+contribute to the game logic in a more concrete way. 
+
+Overall I'm very happy with how our game turned out. Last year I tried to participate in a few more game jam, but
+due to a combination of lack of personal motivation, poor team dynamics, and other factors, none of those game
+jams panned out. This was the first game jam in a while where I feel like I really connected with my team and I
+also feel like we made a super polished and fun to play game in the end.