During the month of November, I took part in the Game Off 2025, a month-long game jam hosted by Github. It was the occasion for me to put to the test a new game idea I had been brewing for a few months.
I am proud to present to you: Void builder.
Void builder is a tower defense with a hint of city building in which you restore the world by placing tiles, creating combos between tiles and using them and their effects to stop waves of monsters. Monsters first appear as breaches in the ground that progressively grow until a monster is released from them. The breaches can be blocked by placing a tile above it. The aim of the game is to fill the area without letting monsters reach and damage the beacon.
I am amazed by the quantity of work that I managed to pour into this project. Although I am familiar with game jams, I had never taken part in a game jam for a whole month! This was an experience I really enjoyed.
Amazingly, you go through "grief stages" similar to a weekend jam but just way slower. The first week is messy and you do not really know where you go. Then the second and third week carry most of the motivation, with a little panic attack in the middle when you realise half the time is gone. Finally, in the last week you get to test the game a bit more and understand the flaws and you make your peace with it until the submission deadline.
I presented the whole gameplay loop earlier in the article. This is because the game has a clear issue of clarity. From the feedback I managed to gather, players struggle to understand many aspects of the game: How to interact with cards, how to place tiles, what tiles effects are and what they do. And in the end, players tend to place tiles randomly until they stumble upon a tile evolution. They fail to recreate evolutions because they have trouble understanding the "recipe" to recreate this evolution. Finally, monster behavior is not clear enough and players fail to understand how breaches work. All in all, there is still a lot of work in term of UI/UX and game design.
This feedback is particularly precious to me because I plan on continuing this game as my side project. For the past years, I have always been working on a game project but it has never been that clearly defined and designed. I feel like this game jam, not only produced a result I am proud of but also an opportunity to keep working on a project more concrete than ever. As such, if after trying my game you would like to share some feedback please contact me on Discord. Any feedback can be useful!
Despite the lack of clarity, I have received very positive feedback regarding the visuals of the game. People love the art style and general atmosphere. I am very proud that this part of the game is spot on. When I start imagining a game (be it for a game jam or a personnal project) I often find it way easier to imagine its visuals first rather than its mechanics. That makes designing the game loop of the game all the more tedious to me. As such, it is particularly important to me that the game was visually pleasing.
I had two pieces of art that served as inspiration and I think I managed to make the most out of it without leaning towards copying it.
Here is the post that inspired the style of the map.
Thank you for reading to the end! If this subject interested you stay tuned. I have some more details to share regarding the work done during this jam.
I hope to see you in the next post. 🦦
Sources:
Sea Otter Games