The making of... Global Game Jam 2025 edition

This year, for a second time in a row, I worked in two projects in parallel for Global Game Jam; this was only possible because of virtual sites (something that we inherited from COVID times, I think), and extended time frames as the GGJ evolves away from hectic crunching into the possibilities of a healthier pace outside the normal weekend.

This post explores the journey of creation of Glade of Tranquility, a game in which you live inside a peaceful glade, shielded by a bubble from the outside world while it burns (you can download it for Windows here). How did development happen, what went right, what went wrong… Are you ready? let’s go!

The team, working remotely, had Albertín444 (new contact) acting as 3D artist, Nicolás Calderón Bolivar (had heard about him before but never worked together) also acting as 3D artist, Esteban Martínez (you probably already know about him if you read this blog) acting as Narrative/Gameplay Designer, Alejandra Torres (new) and QuietGecko (old) in the Audio department, and myself (old) as Designer, Programmer and Producer. Most of the team was working in parallel in at least one more entry.

Why do two entries, are you crazy?

Yes.

Why do two entries?

I already explored this in my videolog but in summary, it’s a different dynamic.

For these virtual entries, the process is something like: myself having a weird idea, writing it down, and pitching it mostly to artists, then taking their input to further develop and refine the idea (but keeping more control over the core of it) and pushing development forward, coordinating the art and design efforts, and taking production choices when needed.

I’m not sure I would be able to do this in a physical site, with a team, where everybody wants to help shape the game. It does sound a bit unfair… or maybe I’m just too shy to push forward like that (why would someone pick my idea instead of theirs?).

In any case, given how things went for both entries this year, I feel next year I’d rather do a single entry, focus all of my dwindling energies into it. Maybe I’ll be able to do this on the physical one?

Before the jam

On January 19, I learned about the theme: bubble. I very quickly thought of a couple of ideas that might be promising. One of them was simulating living inside a bubble, isolated, an analogy of the need of wanting to be alone. I had a problem tho: I didn’t really have any ideas for gameplay elements… the framing of everything was clear, but I needed to fill in the details, to make it a worthwhile experience.

Then I remembered fellow game-jammer and slashwareknight narrative designer Esteban Martinez (the biggest samples of his work in the shape of gamejam games being Farewell San Vicente, and Muyscamuy) had asked me to let him know about any cool upcoming jams earlier this year, and he was the perfect man for the job.

So, I sent him a voice message, pitched him my idea, and let him know it was a very barebones thing that could greatly benefit from him putting some meat around the skeleton. He really liked the idea.

(The other idea I had, IIRC, was making some kind of chill “build your own pixel art farm, full creative, same core idea of living inside a bubble. I still want to do that one, of course, I cannot restrain myself)

The soul of the “game”

So, what was the core idea of the game? this is how I pitched it initially:

Can you really be happy inside the bubble?

A simulation of living in a cabin all alone, inside a bubble. Away from the world, nothing and no one can disturb you. You spend your days fishing while the world around you develops in chaos.

How long will you manage to live in this perfect place of tranquility until the bubble bursts and you have to face reality?

If you know a little bit about my work, you might notice some connection to that other big project, Emerald Woods. That is no coincidence, I believe they share a lot of what’s on their core (except the “bubble” in Emerald Woods is much bigger, to allow for much more interesting and expansive exploration).

There were some things that were super clear to me (you may say non-negotiable), and managed to stay to the end.

• Priority was to touch the player feelings, not to have thrillling gameplay mechanics.
• The visuals would be 3D, first person, low poly.
• The bubble surrounding the area had to have a material which allows to see through, distorted, what was happening outside (a somewhat depressing landscape)
• The closer you are to the edge, the stronger you can hear chaotic sounds outside of the bubble

Building a team

I started building a document with the overall idea. A document that could serve as a foundation for Esteban (mainly) to expand, which could also be useful to easily pitch the game to other devs (classic slashie modus operandi). It also included some initial needs for art.

Since this happened in the TGYJ virtual venue, I scoured its discord trying to get some people on board; I got the interest of several artists, with two of them showing interest in working in the project after seeing the pitch (Yun Kobata, Albertin444). The discord had a slow start this year, and a lot of people was wondering what was going on (I have an idea what likely happened). I think that help me grab the attention of people.

I also mentioned the project to QuietGecko, knowing in advance he was going to be super busy as he was heavily invested into the organization of a physical venue in the far away lands of Chocontá. But I knew he would find the way to help with the audio, like he always does.

Day 1 – Friday, January 24

Early in the morning, I added some details about the gameplay to the document, since I knew it was going to be harder to convince people to join if there was only a brief idea of a setting. I also set up a blank Unity project using the Starter Assets: Character Controllers, of which I learned while working on a client project last year; basically they are templates for first person and third person games, providing you a camera setup, input and physics for your game.

I thought it was a perfect fit because I wasn’t really looking forward to innovate in any of these aspects; I wanted basic 3D first person, and that’s what it brought out-of-the-box… (well, almost. It wasn’t without some struggles specially with the input setup, but overall it was worth the effort.)

My work day was super busy, so I had to put the project aside as I fought in the battlegrounds of React Native and UEFN work. However around noon I was contacted by Nicolás Calderón a.k.a. Nicolino; his team was already working in a project, but he was considering collaborating in my team as well. I saw his portfolio and it was a perfect fit for our game, so I showed him the document and he said he was up to contribute, although he was unsure how much time he could devote.

Then, later on on the night, I was already bootstrapping the other entry at the physical venue, but Albertin insisted the team to meet in a call and sync, which was a great idea. I managed to set apart some time to chat with the team, pretty late into the night, with Albertín and Esteban showing up, and we were able to discuss the spirit of the project in more detail. Albertín also asked for references for the visual style, I got the task to fill that.

Esteban started detailing gameplay ideas, content, and possibilities of interaction into the document. Albertín got a start in the modeling, with the cabin in the middle of the forest.

Nicolás also asked for visual references for the art, to which I replied with his very own Nicolino Forest Asset Pack. He wasted no time and provided the pack for the project, with instructions on how to replicate the shading for other assets we would be making.

I got home and continued working on getting the Starter Assets controller input to work; there was a weird issue with the mouse camera movement not working at all and it ate a lot of my time to figure out what I was missing in the setup. I wasn’t able to figure it out and decided to add camera movement using the arrow keys, so that I could at last start working in the specifics of the entry.

I cleaned up the test scene, and added some trees and forest props from Nicolino; finally I added a first version of The Bubble, using a simple semi-transparent material.

Nicolino went on to work in a more appropriate shader for the bubble during midnight.

Day 2 – January 25

I got the bubble shaders from Nicolino with a couple of different options; I tried to integrate them but ran into some issues initially to set them up. Luckily, Nicolino sent me a very detailed video to help me debug the situation (it ended up being something super simple: I wasn’t assigning the textures to the shader). I also accidentally found out the source of the issues with camera mouse movement: nothing. It just didn’t work well inside the IDE when the Game view was not maximized, at least for me. Ugh.

Albertín was working on a first batch of models, as well as finishing the texture of the cabin,

Day 3 – January 26

Continuing with the task of bringing life to the scene, I added a pond to the location, also using a shader provided by Nicolino and replacing the plane of the scene with a terrain object with a hole.

I knew I would have very limited time this day, and the priority was not letting the team down for my other entry, so I kept wondering how to close the loop on this one; clearly I wasn’t going to be able to make it but, at least I had to make something that felt complete.

“El Rinconcito Sonoro” is an initiative of QuietGecko’s to have sound artists contribute to projects in game jams; we submitted Glade of Tranquility into it, and so we had Alejandra join the project. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to include all of it, but I did a first test with the forest ambience, just to give a little more of life to the scene, initially.

I decided that, at least, I should add fishing in some way since that was in from the beginning, so I added a first iteration of it, including some simple introspection messages.

It seemed this was going to be it, something of a lesson to better focus on a single entry next year to avoid wasted efforts. However… late in the day it was announced that, due to the issues with the submission system, the deadline had been extended for one day. How lucky!

Day 4 – January 27

Since I had been given a chance by fate, I decided I was going to push through a bit, as much as my limited time would allow.

First thing I did was adding the possibility of… dying, so that there was actually a game there; so you could now die of unwellness, very simplified from what Esteban had planned originally, which included fulfilling other needs.

I also added a day and night cycle, pulling a lot of the logic from NovaMundi and tweaking it for a much more simplified world model.

I went ahead to improve the scene visually, by fixing the materials of the cabin (I had overlooked that Albertin had forgotten to send them) and doing a lot of landscaping on the terrain, as well as including all the props the team created.

Sadly, Yun announced he would have to drop from the project due to issues with energy supply at his hometown, Barranquilla. Frustratingly, that had prevented him from investing enough time into the project.

As I rushed to include as much of the work that the rest of the team had done, I found something fun: In Esteban’s original design, there was going to be an “old phone” which you could use to contact your friends and family; Esteban noted it as “old phone (rotary)” in the asset list that was picked up by Albertin. Interestingly, the artist thought of this as an old smartphone from the 2010s, and that was the asset he provided. That made me feel a bit old.

Esteban’s plans were that you could use that phone to call friends and family and they might come and visit you to the boundaries of the bubble, with possitive and negative effects depending on your choices when interacting with them (and chance). Sadly, none of this made it into the game.

Since I knew that these mechanics, as well as some other things that Esteban had designed, weren’t going to make it, I decided to add a simpler version of them: random musings, good and bad, will randomly pop into your head. These may cause some damage in your tranquility, or boost it.

As part of trying to cram as much of the art made for the game as possible, I added a dog placed beyond the bubble initially. My ideas was to make players feel sad (bwahaha) because they would want to pet the dog, but they couldn’t because of the bubble.

In theory, we had some more hours but I was REALLY burned out. Even so, I wanted at least to have an activity that the players could do instead of mechanically fishing to survive; something that would require at least a little bit of exploration… but I had a hard time coming up with something that was small enough.

My daughter was hovering around the office as usual, and she wanted to know more about what I was doing so I told her. She felt pretty sad that the dog was outside the bubble, and that it was actually the dog the one that was alone out there in the murky buildings while you were in the nice forest. She said I HAD to add a way to pull him inside the bubble so I told her it was her task to come up with something.

And well, she had some good ideas about it! I sadly was just too tired by that time of the day, to implement her vision entirely… but at least some of it got in (I won’t spoil it). I told her she was a genius (I genuinely believed it).

In the last hours of the project, Gecko jumped into it and worked with Alejandra to integrate the ambiences into the scene with some ambience spots, hooking the chaos, lake ambiance, and more. Later on they even managed to add some sound effects for walking, fishing and dying. As always, I appreciate your contributions.

The final hour was balancing a lot of the values to try and make the gameplay a bit more interesting, adding a cap to the bubble strength and basic needs stats to prevent the game becoming too easy if you fished a lot, and improving the appearance of the glade and the city around it.

That’s the story for the game! I hope you manage to give it a go and let me know here, or in the discord, what you think about it!