Just finished a 72 hours game jam called the “Quarantine Jam,” hosted by developers in Italy who are in lockdown. The game jam started on Friday, March 13th at 3:00 PM PST and ended on Monday, March 16th at 3:00 PM PST.

I completely this game solo while streaming it on Twitch for record keeping purposes. The theme of the game jam was “A lot of…” and since there is a Covid-19 pandemic right now, I thought a virus theme would be appropriate.

I decided to make a classic 2D shoot ’em up (Shump) side scroller game that takes place inside a human blood vessel. The player is a “Nanobiotic,” which is a completely made up word I just thought of for the title. The enemies are Covid-19 viruses. I added a twist to the normal Shump game play by making the enemies you miss pile up on the left side of the screen behind the player, basically punishing the player for not killing all the viruses. The viruses continue to shoot at the player until they are destroyed with a macrophage bomb or with one of the upgraded weapons.

The bosses in this game are just larger versions of the virus that shoot projectiles at the players in various patterns. I had a lot of fun setting these patterns up, especially the final boss where I took three big viruses and spun them around a central point, all the while spewing out projectiles.

For my development process, I did it like this:

• Brainstormed the type of gameplay and theme/setting
• Wrote down a list of all the basic assets I needed, such as sprites and SFX
• Made a basic playable version with placeholder sprites and no effects
• Added final sprites for the player, enemies, drops, and weapons
• Programmed the rest of the waves and bosses
• Added “juice,” which included BGM, SFX, particles galore etc
• Added an animated background to simulate blood cells moving with each heart beat
• Changed the text/UI/menus to match the virus theme
• Exported the game to Mac and WebGL

I ran into some problems when exporting to PC, as the resolution kept changing and my homing shots’ behavior changed for some reason. Since I had a working WebGL version, I decided to just uploaded that and the Mac version for the Quarantine Jam. You can find it at https://teabunnystudios.itch.io/nanobiotics

Overall, I had a lot of fun participating in this game jam (my first!). I learned a lot and was forced to adapt to any unforeseen challenge, as I was on a strict time limit. I’m planning to participate in more game jams and/or make more mini web games to put on this site.

You can see a gameplay video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZGqCzbfFAc