Create the Best Game You Can in 48 Seconds in Game Jam

Some wild, crazy stuff comes from the dozens of game jams that happen all over the world. You just get some really interesting stuff when you have people pushing themselves for a day or two to make crazy games matching a specific theme. Free game developer Locomalito created his own little game to celebrate the kind of ingenuity that goes into making these games, and released the silly platformer, titled Game Jam, a few days ago.

In Game Jam, you’re making the best dang game you can in forty-eight seconds. This means platforming around a dark, castle-like environment looking for genres, themes, and playstyles, all of which are represented by small, glowing symbols. You only have a short time to grab them, and the threat of constant interruption from spinning squares and hostile clouds is ever-present. Getting hit from one of those gives the team a setback, freezing the player in place for a second and then forcing you to grab a new symbol to replace what you lost.

If you bring enough of these symbols back to the computer in the middle of the screen, along with several healthy doses of polish, you just might make something playable. Or a crappy RPG like I did. The game starts moving faster and faster as the player picks up more polish symbols, so making something decent within the short time frame isn’t easy.

Game Jam goes by quickly, and will provide some laughs for the  Mad Libs-like games it comes up with. Will we ever see a game jam whose theme has been created by a quick play-through of Game Jam? With all of the weird possibilities a quick run at the game provides, it could happen.

For more information on Game Jam and the other free games that Locomalito has created, you can head to his website or follow him on Twitter.