🚀 Mock Game Jam: “Small World”

🎮 Try the game here in browser: Play “Small World” on itch.io

I decided to do a practice game jam before my first real one next week. I asked ChatGPT to generate a 24-hour game jam challenge, and the theme it gave me was “Small World”, with the modifier: “Use 2 colors”.

After some brainstorming, I came up with a simple idea I could actually finish in a day:

You are a tiny rock—a “small world”—and your goal is to collide with smaller rocks to grow bigger while avoiding larger rocks. 🪨✨

Keeping to the two-color restriction was easy: the background is black ⚫, and everything else is white ⚪.

🌌 Procedural Starfield

At first, I planned to just make a static starfield image and import it. But I decided to go procedural instead, so the background is random every time you play.
To make the world feel infinite, any star that drifts too far from the player is moved to the other side of the screen. ♾⭐

🎨 Creating the Assets

Making the rocks was surprisingly fun! I used Piskel to make 5 simple images and imported them into the game.
Each rock is randomly spawned with:

• One of 4 textures 🎭
• A size relative to the player 📏
• Random speed ⚡
• Random direction 🔄

This made the world feel dynamic and alive without much effort!

🎮 Game Mechanics

Once the rocks were set up, the mechanics were straightforward:

• Collision detection to determine if the player grows or loses 🔁
• Updating the player’s size and status ⬆⬇

Simple, but it works—and that’s the point for a practice jam! ✅

💡 Final Thoughts

The game isn’t polished and it’s probably far from perfect, but it’s playable and fun.
This jam was a great exercise in:

• Procedural generation 🌌
• Randomized gameplay 🎲
• Quick asset creation 🎨
• Handling collisions and player growth 🪨⬆

I learned a lot and now feel more confident for the real jam next week! 💪🚀