WELCOME!
Welcome to the PLU Game Jam! Are you interested in learning to make games at PLU during the 2023-2024 school year? Build a team of students spanning as many different disciplines as you can/want, and work together to create something that combines all of your expertise!
This website will serve as both the home of the jam, where you will submit your projects at the end, as well as a hub of information and community. On this page specifically you can find a description of the jam, a long list of tools for you team to use throughout the jam, as well as all the specific rules for our jam. On the community page, you can make posts asking questions, showing off cool things you have made, or just chat about game development!
Themes
This jam will have a list of themes for you to choose from! You do not have to use them all, or any if you don't want to, though it is encouraged. They only exist to give you some inspiration, and to create some unifying ideas between the games that are made.
From the Top
Second Wind
Snowball Effect
Best of Both Worlds
Anti-Hero's Journey
How do I make a game?
There are tons of free tools available to help you with every aspect of game development, from programming, music, 3D Modeling, pixel-art, narrative design, and more!
Game Engines
The glue that ties it all together. While it is definitely possible to make a game without using an engine, it will be a mighty task for any programmers on your team. We highly recommend seeing what engines are out there, and picking the one that works best for you. Every engine has its own strengths and weaknesses, and can decide import parts of you final game, like what platforms you can release your game on. Here are some examples to get you started, but they are not all that is out there.
Armory3D is an open-source 3D game engine that focuses on portability, minimal footprint, and performance, offering full Blender integration and turning it into a complete game development tool.
Construct3 is a cutting-edge 2D game engine that allows users to create stunning games directly in their browser, featuring a powerful event sheet view for visual scripting, no coding required, and the ability to add JavaScript for more control.
Defold is a free and open-source game engine known for its ease of use, efficient runtime, and strong support for 2D game creation, while also being capable of 3D game development.
GameMaker is a series of cross-platform game engines, developed by YoYo Games, that primarily focuses on 2D game development. It offers a custom drag-and-drop visual programming language and a scripting language known as Game Maker Language for more advanced games.
Godot is a cross-platform, free and open-source game engine that supports both 2D and 3D game development, offering multiple programming languages such as C++, C# and GDscript, and uses a hierarchy of nodes for an efficient development experience.
MonoGame is a free and open-source C# framework used by game developers to create games for multiple platforms and other systems, including desktop PCs, video game consoles, and mobile devices.
Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, that supports both 2D and 3D graphics, offers scripting through C#, and is known for its ease of use for beginner developers and popularity in indie game development.
Unreal Engine is a powerful, open-source 3D game engine developed by Epic Games, known for its high-quality graphics, advanced real-time 3D creation tool for photoreal visuals and immersive experiences, and its usability across multiple platforms.
Art
The vast majority of games require something to be drawn to the screen. There are tons of different options available for different kinds of art. Some games even have their artists make physical art that is then scanned in to the game to be used as assets. Here are some tools to get you started.
Aseprite is a proprietary, source-available image editor specifically designed for creating pixel art and animations, offering features such as layers, frame tagging, onion skinning, color control, tiled mode, and data recovery.
GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation, retouching, editing of images in the form of free drawings, and transcoding between different image file formats.
3D Modeling
Blender is a free and open-source 3D creation suite that supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline, including modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and even video editing and game creation.
picoCAD is a program designed to build and texture low-poly 3D models, aiming to make the process fun, easy, and accessible by focusing on the bare essentials.
Music
FL Studio is a comprehensive digital audio workstation developed by Image-Line, offering a range of tools for composing, editing, and mixing music, with a user-friendly interface that supports pattern-based sequencing.
MuseScore is an open-source music notation software that runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, offering an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor with audio score playback for results that look and sound beautiful.
Reaper, an acronym for Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording, is a complete digital audio production application for computers that offers a full multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing and mastering toolset.
Writing
Twine is an open-source tool designed for creating interactive, nonlinear stories, with capabilities to extend stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript, and it publishes directly to HTML1.
If you have another tools that you would recommend, please let us know so we can add them to this list as a resource for your peers.
Rules
- Your final game must be playable on a Windows or MacOS machine. You are allowed to export it for other platforms as well, but Windows/MacOS is the minimum, as that is how we will test it. Web/HTML games are good as well.
- All games must stay "school appropriate". This means avoiding grotesque violence or explicit nudity and absolutely no hateful language or visuals. This does not mean we want you to avoid difficult topics. Please consider avoiding extremely strong language and excessive gore, as the jam should be suitable for a general audience. If you’re uncertain, err on the side of being less gratuitous.
- Using premade assets IS allowed, as long as said assets are acquired legally and legitimately. We want to encourage you to work with your fellow studnets to create the assets that are not within your own skillset, but we also understand how much is requied to make a game, so make what you can, and use what you need to get the project done.
- We're asking that you do not use generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney to directly create assets for your game. All the code, art, music, written text, and so on should be made by a human. This includes the artwork on your game's page and thumbnail. This does not mean that you cannot use these tools to assist in the process. Ask ChatGPT how to do something, and learn from it's response, but do not copy it's response directly!