Lever Up - An Alt Ctrl Game Jam

This jam is now over. It ran from 2024-12-06 00:30:00 to 2024-12-09 00:30:00. View 8 entries

Welcome to Lever Up, an alt ctrl game jam and controller workshop by the MAGFest Indie Arcade and Arcade Commons! Join us in making a slider controller, building an alt ctrl game designed around a unique slider-based control scheme, and sharing it at Super MAGFest 2025 in January!

How the jam works

Order from our parts list to get everything you need for your controller
Follow our assembly documentation to build a slidey controller and program it to talk to a computer via standard keyboard inputs
Join us in the Arcade Commons Discord to talk to other jammers
Steal our code, and upload it to your microcontroller
Make a game in 4 days, and share it here
See selected games on a custom cabinet at Super MAGFest in January 2025!

Note: To be eligible to shown on the MAGFest cabinet, games must be ready to run on Windows. Web games have issues when presented in a multi-cab format and we cannot promise that any games developed for a web platform will be playable at the event so please submit an exe if possible.

This is a remote jam! Jammers will be able to talk, ask questions & form teams on the Arcade Commons Discord.

The Theme

The theme for this jam is BALANCE:

This theme can refer to any and all of the many meanings of "balance", both literal and figurative
Your game does not have to relate to the theme, the goal is to give you a concept to kickstart brainstorming

Part Substitutions

Some items on our parts list may be sold out. You can get help in the discord channel, but here are some potential substitutions:

Alternate alligator clips (you may want to buy two of these packs)
Other models of the Circuit Playground will work fine. These don't have quite as many features as the one we linked to, but you do not need things like bluetooth for this jam. Circuit Playground Express, Circuit Playground Classic

The Controller

For this jam, you’ll be making a game that uses a custom slider controller design. Our controller has 2 sliders, each mapped to a row of keys on a keyboard, as well as a single utility button. When a slider is moved, the controller simulates keyboard presses as if you were running your hand along a row of the keyboard, with one slider mapping to `Q W E R T Y U` and the other to `Z X C V B N M`. The single button maps to the spacebar, acting as a start/pause/submit button (though you can use it for whatever action you need!)

Buying and building a custom controller isn't mandatory for participation in this jam. You can emulate the functionality of these sliders by sliding your hand over your keyboard to help with development and playtesting, but the exact feeling of sliding up and down will be unique to the controller, and should factor into your game's design and implementation. If your game requires any keys that aren't on the slider/button design, it won't be playable with the custom controller, so limit all interact to those 14 keys and the spacebar.

Designing for Sliders

Although building the custom controller is optional for this jam, submissions should be designed with a slider controller in mind. Some things to consider:

The sliders only send keypresses when they are moved between key thresholds (this is mostly so that they controller isn't spamming keystrokes all the time)
What gameplay feelings can you get with a slider that might not be possible with standard controller or keyboard inputs?
What happens if a player moves the sliders very fast, slamming the input direction from one end to the other?
If you’re making a multiplayer game, what does a given player’s gameplay look like if all they have is a single slider?

Lever up at Super MAGFest 2025

We're building a cabinet that will run selected submissions at the Indie Arcade Expo at Super MAGFest in January 2025! The cabinet will use big ol' levers instead of sliders, but still map inputs to keys in the same way the slider controllers do at home! More build pics to come (as we actually build it).