Cross stitch pattern of a raccoon wearing pink shutter shades in a vaporwave style. This was the program icon for Cold Metal Garbage that we didn’t have enough time to implement. Download the PDF here: Rad Raccoon Pattern

Grid Size: 40W x 40H
Design Area: 2.86″ x 2.86″ (40 x 40 stitches)
Colors: 11

I have a Patreon where all the best people lurk.

Want to play the best game ever? It doesn’t have anything to do with cross stitching, but you can download it directly here: Cold Metal Garbage

Or you can get it from the Global Game Jam website here: globalgamejam.org

Note that there’s some lag after you “press any key to garbage”. Just give it a few seconds and the game will start. We found out that this is because the audio file for the start sound effect was too long and the game wouldn’t start until it had finished playing. We didn’t have time to fix it.

Anyway, this year I managed to finish a game for Global Game Jam for the first time. I’ve done other jams, but I’ve never felt like those games were complete. If you don’t know, a game jam is an event where you try to make a video game from the ground up all in the span of one weekend. It’s pretty common for people to sleep at the venue on the floor or on couches so that they don’t lose any time commuting. I slept over at my second jam and got woken up by security who didn’t believe me and didn’t even apologize after he called the event coordinator. Yeah, not doing that again.

You can go with a team or you can just join a team when you get there. This year we decided to let people pitch their plans first so that people could join projects that they liked. I pitched a game kind of like Katamari but you’re picking up garbage and the more you collect, the bigger pieces of pollution you can pick up. Sadly no one was interested so I joined a group with a vague animal idea and no direction. We ended up mixing the ideas of animals and garbage and ended up with a raccoon eating garbage. The vaporwave aesthetic came from one of my teammembers who liked to compose that kind of music. I did most of the artwork and she said it was more like Simpsonswave in the end.

I had never done any level design before, but I knew I wanted the game to be more exploratory than linear, so I decided to set the start point in the middle of the map. The problem there was that playtesters always went northeast or northwest from the start. I found out that people didn’t realize that you could cross the street. I tried to fix this by subtly changing the colors. Paths that you can walk on are less saturated than obstacles. It didn’t work that well so I ended up just putting pieces of food on the sidewalk and road to indicate that the sidewalk was not a wall and that did the trick.

I had a lot of fun and I’ll definitely do more game jams in the future. I even have a new idea. I want to make a game where you’re the sidekick to an Ironman-like hero. You have to constantly monitor his suit and upgrade it on the fly for different environments and villains, all while diverting small amounts of resources to making your own power armor so you can eventually join him. You lose if Ironman dies and you win when you complete the second suit.