Last December 9th, we released Plisitol Jam Collection, our compilation of game jam games we improved over the years.

These games were made mostly during game jams on the forums of the French website developpez.com. Users of this forum had the privilege of seeing most of the updates happening in real time for most of the life of these games, so we realized that communities outside need some history to catch up on our game making journey :)

First, who are we?

I'm Guntha, I've been working professionally in the games industry for 10 years, working first on mobile and console ports of some older point'n'click games, then on other various projects. I take pride in making my own engine used in the games featured in Plisitol Jam Collection, and also professionally, projects that used in-house engines are the ones I enjoy the most. I'm an eclectic gamer, so for now I can't settle on a type of game I would want to specialize in.

I am accompanied by Biiscuit, who is an artist who also loves physical projects, and she brought a lot of personality into our games.

Now that you know who is talking to you, prepare yourself for the longest section of this post: the history of each game!

shootsansnom (an unnamed shoot'em up game)

Oops, the first game we'll be talking about is not a jam game! It's a game I made when I was still a student.
Inspired by Gradius, R-TYPE, Ikaruga, Under Defeat or the games made by ASTRO PORT (Demolition Gunner: In Seek And Destroy, Satazius...), I figured a shoot'em up was doable with the skills I had back then. Since Java was the language I was most comfortable with, that's what I used. I assembled 2 levels (and a half), using a messy text format. As a twist - since all shmups have to add one - I added a small satellite that goes constantly around your ship, and freezes its position relative to you when you start shooting, and it shoots in the direction it's locked it. It was surprisingly interesting to use it in some areas of the levels.

Prince of Bricks

Now that's the actual first jam game, in 2011. I made a first jam tentative the year before, that went nowhere because of a bad design I came up with that couldn't be fixed.
This time I was inspired by Flashback, Bermuda Syndrome and the like. Since I lacked the animation skills your little character doesn't have legs while it's moving. That didn't prevent me from releasing the game though.
You simply more around the level, tile by tile, and activate levers and fight enemies in your way. I even released a small level editor along with it, and you can still find it in this Collection!
This one was still made in Java.

Cara Cara

In 2014, I came up with a game that for the first time I thought could be released commercially, given more content and polish. Unfortunately, life, jobs and other interesting projects got in the way.
This was the first game I released using my own, C++ and OpenGL, engine. Supporting only OpenGL on Windows back in the day unfortunately meant that many computers couldn't run it properly.
At its first release, the game only featured the level going in a straight line. At the time I could generate a curved road, but for some reason the cars and the camera didn't follow the curve properly, an issue I fixed much later, which now allows me to offer you a version of the game with a second, curved, level.
As for the inspiration for this game, this time it was "Kuru Kuru Kururin with cars".

Conveyor Map

A name that describes this graphics experiment. I had an idea for a map with moving borders, like a conveyor belt. Graphics programming is not exactly my comfort zone, so I struggled to get this result, and I'm pretty happy with it. I didn't come with a full game idea for it, so it stayed a pretty experiment. Game ideas are welcome!

Swimming Brick

I wanted - and still want - to make a complete underwater adventure game. Inspired by the underwater segments of the original Tomb Raider games, Mario 64, or more recently Abzu. So I took this occasion in a jam in 2016 to start it.
My main problem was that my engine didn't feature a 3D collision system at all, so I had to come up with something during the jam!
I rewrote this system at least twice, and the last version allows me to make pretty free-form levels using the Trenchbroom level editor.
The first version featured a top-down view, and very basic rooms with some walls and small houses. The player is a small cube made of bricks, borrowed from the previous year's experiment, hence the name.
This was the first game I made after adding DirectX12 support to my engine, which in theory guarantees that any computer running Windows 10 can run it.
It's probably the project that changed the most, both in concept and visually. The improved version featured in the Collection features long tunnels, door mechanisms, better lighting and effects...

How Swimming Brick looked like in 2016 vs how it looks like now

Never Escape

This time, Biiscuit came up with the ideas: she wanted to create some isometric assets, and wanted to work on an escape-the-room type game.
So we mashed these ideas together, added some basic procedural generation, and there you have it: an isometric escape-the-room point'n'click game with procedural rooms! Each time you manage to get out of the room, a new one gets generated. The idea behind the room generation was that each new room required 1 more mouse click than the previous one. In practice it doesn't work every time, but nothing an update to this Collection can't fix!

Fire Exit

2018 was the first year that the jam games during the developpez.com jam could optionally obey a theme. For this one, the them was "It's the end of the world!".
I tried to play the game fully and completely fill the theme. After brainstorming during the first night of the jam, I had this idea of protecting a stream of people from the ever-expanding flames so they could reach a rocket before it took off to flee the doomed Earth. Your only tool was a bunch of fireplanes that could temporarily extinguish part of the fire by tracing a line over it.
I was ready to ship the game with hastily drawn stickmen, but Biiscuit came up with her little people designs,  which gave the game so much personality that we reused them in future games!

Biiscuit's little people, reused in 3 games

After the jam, I kept working on this game for a year, making a level editor, starting new levels, hoping I could fill it with enough of them to make a complete game. The current version features two levels, one where you have to use the fireplanes, another one where you also have to send lumberjacks cut some trees to free the way in front of the people. I still have more ideas for tools and maps that I hope to add someday!

WE2019

This year the theme was "think of two things at once", which found us so uninspired that we kept the codename for this project.
We mashed a beat'em up game with an ... "order food on the phone" game. You have to use all your pocket money to buy food, but everyone around you tries to beat you up, and steal some of your money if they manage to hit you! You have to finish the game with exactly 0 money to win.

First Plague

In 2020 the them was "The number 10". Out of ideas, I literally searched for the number 10 on Wikipedia, and among the first matches was the Ten plagues of Egypt. Going through them, I started having a precise idea of what a game loosely based on the River of Blood would look like.
We went for an endless runner. I made a system that added chunks of level one after the other. The chunks were made in Trenchbroom, allowing me to use my collision system I started during the previous years. Then I added the flow of blood that tried to catch up the player. This was the trickiest part to balance: you don't want the player to lose at the first mistake, but you don't either want it to slow down so much that the player can easily keep going infinitely.
Biiscuit made the 2D art: the crocodiles, the gorgeous boat, the palm trees, and the Egyptian version of the little people.
At first I wanted the entire map to look "bloody" behind where the blood stream already passed, but in the end the blood stayed in the water.
Somehow back then I didn't link that name with the current events.

Surveillance Sphere

Another pessimistic game where you, the mayor of a dystopic city, refuse to see the truth. Your citizens are doing crimes all over the city, but somehow they manage to hide them from your eyes! Hopefully, The Sphere will allow you to see what they're really up to. Activate the Sphere around a citizen who looks like he's doing something sketchy, and se what he's really doing!
That's what we came up with for the 2 themes of this jam: "Schrödinger's cat" and "Round shapes". The idea was to create a bunch of little crime scenes around a city, for the player to find them. By lack of time, the only crime was waving axes around. Creating the city itself sucked all our time - we kind of expected it, but somehow we still thought it couldn't be that bad - . It can still be polished into a nice 3D "Where's Waldo" or "Hidden Folks".

The city that took all our time, seen here in Trenchbroom

Future games

We still hope to take part in future game jams, and be sure we'll add more games to this Collection when this happens! There is already an update planned with a new game very soon.

Why release them all together?

Every one of these games has a bit of content, and together these games have some value, not only because there are a bunch of them and provide quite some time of entertainment, but also because they provide some history into our game-making journey, from the early days when we were not even really sure how to make a game, to the present where we're more comfortable being more ambitious, can reuse some knowledge and assets we used before, while still making mistakes that make us improve. And this story is not over! There are still ideas we want to add to those games, improvements to be mae, and maybe someday we'll manage to make a game so big it will have its own page on our profile!