Summary

I recently finished a 72 hour game jam in a team of 4 for the Mini Jam 174 Defense event.

This is called FATHOMLESS, a game about keeping an eldritch horror out of your spaceship by transferring power between different systems that frequently break down. This game was created in Godot 4.3, art was created with Aseprite (which was fun to compile from source) and Photopea / Photoshop, and sounds / music were created in both Ableton Live 12 as well as FL Studio 21. Edison my beloved ❤️

We had listed down a lot of inspirations that we had from games that leaned into the industrial / grungy metallic sci-fi aesthetic of which all of us were fond of at the time. This included games such as Zeekerss’ “Lethal Company”, “Please Dont Touch Anything”, David Symanski’s “Iron Lung”, Valve corporation’s “Half Life 1 and 2”, Fun Dog Studios’ “The Forever Winter”, and my absolute personal favourite game, “GTFO” (by the brilliant 10 Chambers) which was a huge inspirational nudge for me personally.

The game jam’s theme was “Defense” while the mandatory constraint was “Only one resource”, so we decided to go with the player only having one battery to use that they had to bring with them at all times to diagnose and fix issues in the starship. Coming up with a satisfying loop was much more tricky than I first anticipated, and took several revisions until we had a system which was fun.

I was responsible for most of the programming of the game, as well as a bunch of different sound FX one-shots and ambiences. There aren’t many opportunities where I can take my long time hobby of music production and combine it with programming and development in such a creative manner, so I’m super proud. We didn’t have enough time to integrate music into the project but we also had stems for a dynamic intensity based music system, which is perfect grounds for a scope extension if the team collectively wants to work on the project further (this might be likely).

We worked tirelessly to create an amazing game for the jam, and considering that we only had 72 hours, a bunch of git merge fails and highly unsettling Godot bugs, I’d say we did a pretty splendid job.

Everyone on the team did splendidly well and put in so much effort towards the final product, so (in spirit) I’m saying a huge thanks to Sam, Nick and Harry for being legends and contributing so substantially to the development of this project.

The game jam voting is limited to participants unfortunately so I can’t ask you all to help out and vote, but I’d still suggest playing it and letting me know what you think.

Thanks, till the next one!