Our game (right here https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463306) is physics based (can you see where this is going ?), made with Unreal Engine 4 (CAN YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING ??) and the player controls a bullet which, of course, moves at high speed (you probably see where this is going) and so if the player tries to go through the floor with enough momentum, they glitch out of the universe and have to restart the game.

How did we fix that ?

We hoped the player wouldn't try to go through the floor.

I can say that I'm a bit normal tier when it comes to coding a game, But when it comes to art & animation... I'm damn horrible. So this jam (as always) I've gone nuts and did some programmer art & programmer juice.
One example of my hacky programmer juice is that I've abused (a lot of) programmatically (procedurally?) generated animations (aka spamming cos()/sin() and random() functions) to add some amount of juicy feeling.

Here, The GIF below is one of the motion that can be seen in game, And below that is the code that I used to make it come alive.

Motion:

Code :

Quite a programmatic apocalypse, And beautiful... Isn't it?
(Also looks like my code readability is just as horrid as the hack... lol)

(PS2 : oh yeah.. the link for those curious adventurer, You can see this tech in action : https://zikbakguru.itch.io/game-game-game-game)

Well, I did something "hacky", but I later found out it didn't work as intended...
So what I did was, when you die in my game, you just respawn without the scene loading, as I thought it'll cut the loading screens time.
But, after adding new ideas, it didn't help at all, as enemy health didn't reset at all, and there were a lot of mines on the field! There were many bugs in the game, I found out recently!

If you want to try it out, here it is:  https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462383

Bit Late on this but I kinda cheated on graphics for myself, I dont have much talent on digital art so it was faster for me to hand draw all my art. I did a card game (https://ilprinny.itch.io/one-card-income for context) so I saved time by hand drawing then just taking a picture with my phone. the rest of the graphics are unity defaults!

This is less of a hack and more of "I'm too lazy to do it the right way"

I'm using Godot for my entry https://mrcdk.itch.io/only-one-finger-driver-mark

Godot UI system is really powerful (the Godot's editor is made with the same UI parts you have access in the engine) so  I used them to create all the "GUI" elements in the game. My game gimmick is that you only have one finger so I wanted the cursor to be that, only one finger. Each UI element in Godot has a property to select the mouse cursor it will use (the arrow, the pointing hand,...) when you are interacting with it. Because my game uses a lot of those elements, changing the cursor mode to each one would take a while... unless you are me and do this in a autoload/singleton (in Godot, a node that loads at the beginning before the scene is loaded and is always loaded) :

func _enter_tree(): # a function called by the engine when the node first enters the scene tree
    # set the default cursor to pointing hand
    Input.set_default_cursor_shape(Input.CURSOR_POINTING_HAND)     
    # load a custom graphic for the cursor     
    Input.set_custom_mouse_cursor(preload('res://assets/hand.png'), Input.CURSOR_POINTING_HAND, Vector2(17, 5))
    # connect the scene tree "node_added" signal to the function "_on_node_added"
    get_tree().connect("node_added", self, "_on_node_added")
    
func _on_node_added(node): # the function connected to the scene tree "node_added" signal
    if node is Control: # if the node added is a Control (base class for all UI elements in Godot)
        node.mouse_default_cursor_shape = Control.CURSOR_POINTING_HAND # Set its default cursor to be a pointing hand

Part of https://github.com/mrcdk/gmtk_gamejam_2019/blob/master/Globals.gd
This way, I made sure that the cursor will always be the pointing hand one and didn't have to worry about adding new UI elements.

Another "I'm too lazy" moment was inputing the text in the fields. I really didn't want to code an input field from scratch... so... I created fake input key events when clicking on the on-screen "keyboard" buttons here https://github.com/mrcdk/gmtk_gamejam_2019/blob/master/Keyboard.gd and blocked all the input events that came from the physical keyboard:

func _input(event):
    if event is InputEventKey and not event.has_meta('fake'):
        get_tree().set_input_as_handled()

Part of https://github.com/mrcdk/gmtk_gamejam_2019/blob/master/Main.gd
Notice how I set metadata in the fake key event I generate in keyboard.gd and only consume the input key events that aren't marked by that metadata (all the ones triggered by the physical keyboard) 

So, some explanation on how this work. In Godot the input event system has the following flow explained in the documentation. As you can see, first the _input() function will process the event and, if the event isn't handled, then the GUI input will process it. Because I'm dealing with GUI elements, if I handle the input event in an _input() function I'll be sure that the event won't reach any GUI element. Put 2 and 2 together and that's how I did it.

Our character is two halves connected by a tail. The tail joints kept breaking so we had to increase the position calculations in Unity and devise a system to reduce the characters movement force the faster they go ':D

See how it turned out: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463922#post-881731

Hey! My team and I attempted something quite tricky for the jam, but I'm super proud of it and it would mean a lot if you were able to take the time to give it a play and rate the game!

MICROVANIA - A One Screen Mini-Metroidvania with a Twist!  

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462198

And a few notes to help you play it! (The Game Jam build has a few bugs and quality of life issues) 

• - It works with Keyboard OR Gamepad 
• - You can view the controls in the menu (Esc or Start) 
• - The Player has 3x Health but will be instantly killed by Dragon Fire
•  - If you die twice, you should close and reopen the game (it breaks more and more with each death) 
• - There are two Winning Endings (You Kill the Dragon, or You Give the Dragon What it's Looking for!) 
• - There are 5 secret Gems hidden throughout the game if you can't find the last one, keep looking!

My main menu and game over screens are just pictures slapped on top of the game level. If you press jump on the main menu it even plays the sound effect.  I had my 11 year old daughter voice Zeus

https://padr81.itch.io/by-zeus-beard

I really wasn't liking my game's looks for most of the jam, so halfway through I decided to draw a cupcake to calm down... Turns out it looked cute in the game with a different color palette so i just went with it xD

Cupcakes ftw. :) 

Here's the free cupcakes --> https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462549

in my game, there are doors that make a sound as they open. The doors are opened by specific light switches. I wrote a system for making the audio quieter as the distance to player increased. 

In one of the levels, the player activates a switch to open a door that’s pretty far away. I had an issue, though, the door was so far away that the the audio’s gain was 0. So, rather than fixing the audio system, I just placed another door in the level slightly offscreen so the sound would play from that door instead as it opens offscreen. Problem solved!