Spring is coming! Are you looking forward to warm weather, beautiful plants, and cute bumble bees? Then this jam is the right choice for you! Let's celebrate nature waking up in spring. Let's celebrate the season that lets all the plants, flowers and animals bloom! Join & Have fun! 🌱

Theme

Pick one of the following. Feel free to combine.

Rules

• Every level of experience is welcome
• Feel free to work solo or team-up
• You can create a new game or update an existing one
• Only submit content of your own, or the content you have permission to do so
• AI generated content is prohibited
• NSFW games are not allowed
• Political content is not allowed
• No harassment, bigotry, discrimination or any other likewise content
• Abide by itch.io platform rules
• Have fun

This game jam is powered by HortusFox, an open-source, self-hosted tracking and journaling app for your houseplants! 💚🌱🦊

>> JOIN GAME JAM <<

In this cozy virtual pet sim you'll be taking care of your own Krepa pet. Krepa loves to cuddle, eat, play and just enjoy their life with their owner. Once you started taking care of your own Krepa, you'll eventually fall in love with it. Krepagotchi is wholesome and cozy. You can also send hugs and kisses via the letter feature.

Disclaimer: game originally started last year, but I finished a big update just recently.

It's been a while since the last major update of Krepagotchi was published. But today is the day, and I'm happy to announce the next big update of this cozy and wholesome virtual pet sim. 💚

The Letter Update is now live!

You may already assume what this update is about: Yes, you can now send letters to other pets using a bottle message system. This brings some more coziness to the game, as you can now send and receive letters to/from other random pets. The bottle messages are assigned randomly, so you never know who receives your letter. Likewise, you'll receive letters randomly. Of course, the letter system is moderated, to ensure that only kind, friendly, witty or random informative posts are exchanged. Krepagotchi is a place that is designed to bring you much coziness and wholesomness throughout your day. 

Another cool addition are the birthday and New Year's Eve celebrations. Your Krepa is aging per each month, so you can celebrate its birthday once per month. Furthermore, your Krepa likes New Year's Eve, and will always enjoy partying with you. 🥳

On its monthly special day, your Krepa will be fed cake instead of TNT. But don't overfeed it. 🍰😂 Likewise, on New Year's Eve, there will be fireworks exploding on your screen. 🎇🎆 Last but not least, the music theme will be different on these two events. 🎶

Of course, there are some other additions and changes provided within the recent update. Some of them are listed below.

• Additional birds flying across the screen
• Music button to toggle theme music playing
• Changed some sound effects
• Refactored code
• Improved window appearance  of the Windows build
• Many bugfixes and improvements

You can also watch a new game trailer here:

Already eager to play the game?

>> PLAY KREPAGOTCHI <<

Currently building another game using AquaShell. This time it's a tank simulation game, using top-down perspective.

AquaShell on itch.io!

You can now also obtain AquaShell from itch.io, as it got its own page yesterday.

➡️ Visit the page:

https://danielbrendel.itch.io/aquashell

Casual Desktop Game December Patch 2025

The latest patch will introduce awesome gameplay updates that will further expand your gameplay experience. 🕹️

With this update you'll now be able to save / load scenes using the blueprint feature. This will allow you to create cool battle scenes that you can just quickly load and save, and alter whenever you want. A blueprint state will include all combat entities as well as the current selected background (if any). Another cool thing - that was also requested by the community - is the pause key toggle. This is especially useful if you want to take a longer look at a frozen state of your current destruction - and make better screenshots. Furthermore two more fireworks tools have been added, given that we're heading closer to new years eve: The cake and the mortar. Check out for yourself! See a full changelog below.

Note: Since there have been changes applied to the API, all workshop items must now comply with the recent changes! Please update your workshop tools accordingly.

Full changelog:

⭐ Blueprints: Save/load gameplay scenes

⭐ Cake tool: A fireworks cake with beautiful colors and explosions

⭐ Mortar tool: A fireworks tool with beautiful colors and explosions

⭐ Pause toggle: Pause/resume game to make better screenshots

⭐ Better looking general decal sprite

⭐ API endpoint to use the popup message feature

⭐ Misc improvements and bugfixes

I'm very thankful for all the players supporting the game throughout the last years. It's really awesome that this fan remake game of the ancient Desktop Destroyer is so well recieved by the community. I hope the new features will spark even more joy. To many more years playing Casual Desktop Game! 💪

>> PLAY THE GAME <<

Homepage | Bluesky | Discord

AquaShell v1.0.2 released! 🧩🚀💯 

The latest version 1.0.2 along with the previous version 1.0.1 cover some cool additions, improvements and bugfixes that will further empower your shell scripting experience - a tremendous update in december, 2025. 💚

➡️ Detailed release information:

https://www.danielbrendel.com/blog/51-aquashell-v102-released-empower-your-shell...

➡️ Games:

https://danielbrendel.itch.io/aquaspace-game

https://danielbrendel.itch.io/aquaboard-csrb

➡️ View release:

https://github.com/danielbrendel/dnyAquaShell/releases/tag/v1.0.2

Hey jammers  

The Virtual Pet Jam 2025 has ended and the results are now available for everyone to see! 

The jam winner is: 

Game: Virtual Pet Prototype 

Author: Shiro 

Link: https://itch.io/jam/virtual-pet-jam-2025/rate/3963800 

Congratulations!!  

All results: https://itch.io/jam/virtual-pet-jam-2025/results 

If you want a continuation of the Virtual Pet Jam, please take the survey in my discord's polls channel (or reply here) Thanks to everyone who participated and I hope you had a wonderful experience.

The Virtual Pet Jam 2025 has ended! 🕹️ 

The jam winner is: 

> Game: Virtual Pet Prototype 

> Author: Shiro 

> Link: https://itch.io/jam/virtual-pet-jam-2025/rate/3963800

➡️ All results: https://itch.io/jam/virtual-pet-jam-2025/results

Congratulations! You won the jam! <3 I've announced this also in discord, but I didn't find your name, so I couldn't assign a jam winning badge. If I just missed your name in the list, feel free to let me know. If not, that's fine too. Once again, congrats and have a nice day. =)

Checked it again and it works now! I really like the idea of buying treats with earned funds. Animation is adorable, too. Overall this is a cool game and the idea to makie it a gameboy ROM is pretty nostalgic, too. Good job, really, and I hope you keep on with development.<3 It would be cool to have some background music, too. Overall this is a pretty nostalgic virtual pet. Good job to all involved! :3

I tried it, but the screen dimensions don't match. ^^" Meh, but if you update it, I gonna try it again.^^

Geep! :3 Really cool game! Pretty easy to understand and get into. It feels like Geep is alive, you help it with occassional treatmen, but overall Geep is pretty independent. Would really recommend to keep up with development of Geep. <3

Cool perspective and overall the UI and graphics a very good, really nostalgic^_^ I also like the idea of the radio! Good job and hope you'll keep on developing the game!

Awww, that's sooo adorable! <3 I want to play it, I'm a bit lost with the controls lol xD Gonna try it later, but nonetheless this looks promising! Really like the 90s atmosphere here!

Ha, that's really cool! I like the visual style, music, animation and simply UI. It's also quite fun to take care without any UI in terms of bars and meters. Sometimes the cat suddenly moves to a different location, so I lost some money. xD But it's fun! Also I've got a question: Do I need to endure a round without any destruction, so more kittens join? Given the description, I'd assume as such, in order to prove you're a good kitty parent. So, I guess I have to put more energy to take care of that furry devil. :3 ^_^

Adorable creature. :3 <3 UI looks very good! Unfortunately, clicking buttons didn't do anything for me, and I'm not sure if that's just because all bars were already full. A user feedback would be helpful here. Other than that, it's really cute.^^

This is the most fast-paced virtual pet I've ever seen, but I like it! :D Feels like taking care for a turtle on steroids in the measures of speed of light. :D Good job.^^ 

Awww, that's really adorable. :3 Finally we can have an Axolotl as pet. UwU <3 

Cool game, altough I'm not sure how to properly use the controls.^^" But the idea of finding a long abandoned tamagotchi somewhere in the streets, and taking care for it, is really nice! Graphics really remind me of the 90s, so this is awesome!

This is really cool! I like the 90s retro atmosphere. Feels like sitting in my friends home somewhere around 1995 and exploring games and tamagotchi of that time. The music fits the theme as well. Really appreciate this virtual pet and I'd definitely suggest to keep on developing it. :3

Very fun virtual pet. :D I bet the candy is bloody tasty for the hand xD

Thanks for your review! Glad you like it. I figured I wanted to make it both engaging, but also not too time consuming for the player. So, something suited for commuting, restroom visits or just a few moments of boredom. :D

The jam has started! You can still join the fun. 🥳

The jam has started! Have fun and happy jamming. 🥳

The NPD Awareness Game Jam has finished. Big thanks to everyone who contributed in raising awareness for #NarcissisticPersonalityDisorder 💚

Hey there, thank you all for participating. Altough this jam wasn't really active, the main thing was still very well: A game jam to raise awareness for Narcissistic Personality Disorder! I really hope that there will be more events of any kind to raise awareness, and I'll be happy to contribute. So, thank you all and see you during the next NPD awareness event!

Only two days until the jam starts! You can still join this wholesome and cozy game jam. 💚

Submissions are due in a few hours! 💚 You can already view a few submissions, but you can also still join and submit your game! 

Hey guys, just wanted to post an update.

AquaShell Update incoming: An update of the scripting shell, AquaShell, will soon be released. It will provide more stability and also integrates with winget way better. This way installing the scripting system on your Windows machine is more streamlined. Of course you will still be able to manually download and install it via the official homepage as well as via the itch.io project entries of my AquaShell specific game pages.

New multimedia plugin planned: I'm planning on implementing a new multimedia plugin using either SDL2 or SFML. I'll dig more into the two to see what fits best. Anyways, this ensures a modern multimedia plugin as the current one uses DirectX 9 which is kinda dated. It will still be supported tho, but you can decide for yourself which one you'll eventually be using. Along with the new plugin, I'll create more simple sample games (Snake, Tetris, Asteroids, etc) to showcase the usage.

Standalone bundler: I'm also planning a tool to create standalone EXE files from scripts / scripted apps. This provides more accessibility to people who don't have AquaShell installed. Imagine how cool it would be shipping your multimedia apps / games or any other kind of scripts to users.

It would be really helpful if you'd consider starring the repository on GitHub. AquaShell is free and open-sourced software under the MIT license. 💚

Stay tuned!

Depending on the project I went with the following approaches:

• Built the game from scratch in C++, using DirectX for multimedia handling [1], [2]
• Built the game using my own 2D game engine, called Casual Game Engine (written in C++, uses DirectX, features AngelScript for game implementation) [3], [4]
• Built the game using Phaser when I wanted the game to be played as a web build [5], [6]

Games:

1. Casual Desktop Game, a fan remake of the ancient Desktop Destroyer featuring community content
2. Hyper Frenzy, an arena-styled space shooter / shmup game
3. Casual Pixel Warrior, a 2D top-down wave-shooter with RPG elements, seasonal events and pets
4. Solitarius, a story-driven space shooter, originally designed as a tech demo for the CGE game engine
5. Krepagotchi, a virtual pet game where you take care of a Krepa (depicting a Minecraft Creeper)
6. Bouncy Garden Fox, a jump&run game, originally designed as a present to the HortusFox plant parenting community

I also posted some articles about the progress of developing my games / game engine:

• The story of building my own game engine 🛠️🧱
• Krepagotchi - the story of building my own virtual pet
• Diving into outer space via gamedev 👾

I'd like to have an API to fetch general jam info of a specific game jam, the same info you see when viewing the jam page. Currently, there is no such API available. I only found a thread for jam entries from 2021 where you can entries via https://itch.io/jam/JAMID/entries.json. That's fine tho, but I'd like to fetch the general jam data. For context, I want to make a discord bot for my community that announces jams, like when a jam is about to start, when it's currently in progress, etc. I also want the users to be able to get jam infos via a user command. I'd cache this info of course.

Is any such API planned or are there any workarounds for now, so I could proceed with the bot?

Kind regards

Happy game jam time, everyone. We're all valid. 

Happy World Mental Health Day  You can still join the NPD Awareness Jam! ⭐