#Micro Jam

[andy-jam-blog]

Microjam is the size of a single seed and it moves with its flagella

Don't worry I'll take good care of Micro Ja- A- AAA- AAAAACHOOO!!! .... ... Wups...

[canmom]

I participated in the Micro Jam this weekend! Tyler, creator of the Latios Framework for Unity's DOTS, runs an annual game jam with his friends and I've ended up becoming something of a regular in it.

We made a game called Sanguis Velocitas, in which you're a chompy alien eating blood and spraying it out of the back to go. It's somewhere between asteroids/Jet Lancer, and those games where you're a little fish. Don't spend too long around the poisonous macrophages...

It was a pretty intense jam but it paid off - unlike every previous jam I've been in, the team did not fall apart, and we had a working game at the end of it! here's some of the stuff I did...

on Friday I modelled, rigged, texture painted and animated the main character 'chompey', kind of like a little Audrey II...

on Saturday I wrote the character and animation controllers for chompy, which involved some fiddly quaternion stuff. (Tyler/Dreaming381 gave it a little work after me to smooth out some jitter.)

and today, I did most of the visuals for the game while my friends worked on coding up all sorts of other behaviours - enemies, menus, etc.

that included cooking up a Blender system to generate gnarly looking caves using Geometry Nodes...

which are naturally inspired by Chris Riddell's illustrations of Sanctaphrax. It basically computes a 3D Voronoi pattern on voxels and shapes it with various functions of the distance from the level geometry, then meshes the result. (I was loosely inspired by the techniques used in Solar Ash to procedurally add detail using Houdini.)

Along with that, I piled up a big stack of post-processing effects to render that in Unity, and cooked up a nice little shader for rendering the pulsing effect on the walls and the red blood cells. I may have gone a little overboard but it was nice to be on a platform where post-processing and shadows are actually an option lmao.

Then in like the last 20 minutes I made the particle effect for blood.

I never made a model for the macrophage enemy or a shader for its poison cloud, but outside of that, I got pretty much everything I wanted to do done, and I'm very happy with what came out. Go try it out if you like and maybe leave a rating~

[mrsheo]

«У вас бувало, що ви говорите з кимсь, а вони лиш мовчать?»

Ми з командою створили невеличку гру «Касети» до Ukrainian Micro Visual Novel Jam!

[hyohaehyuk]

thejamlore: jacob trying his best to avoid spoiling sam's presence in season 2 when asked if collaborating again is more seamless after season 1:

Jacob: “after we finished shooting, me and sam have been in constant contact anyway…”

Video: HeyUGuys - Interview with the Vampire - Jacob Anderson on monstrous humans, working with Sam Reid & the future

[mistermalaprop]

no idea what was happening before but i drew Vagabond Micro into this magma canvas

luckily for my antisocial ahh it was empty and the only person i saw was an admin for like 5 minutes

there it is! it's Micro!

[frickmoranis]

seeing ppl talk abt mwca is so crazy bc it’s like. I know those guys. I do art for them. I’m literally getting Chili’s with them in october

[domquixotedospobresblog]

We are strange beings, aren't we? Our intelligence is absurd compared to other species that inhabit our planet, and we don't know that a goodbye means someone who no longer wants to be close to us.

Jonas r Cezar

[freckliedan]

i kinda want to know what do you consider new phannies? i’m not really asking for myself i got into them in 2015 so i think i qualify as not new but i personally think of like 2019ish or later as new even though that’s like 4 years now 😭

there's layers of old but i think anyone who got here from 2019 onward will forever be a new phannie to me! i'm forever delighted by the fact that people are still discovering them but you simply have to have experienced the closeted era to truly count as an old timer and there's nothing that can change that!

i do think there's levels of fandom-age, too. like, original phillies who were around before dan & people who were around before the halloween leak of the vday vid in 2012, that's true phandom olds to me. there's a difference between the aftermath/radio show era, when i showed up, & the tatinof era once they'd settled in to the closet, but having been around in any regard at any of those points makes you some level of old timer.

the endpoint/turning point towards coming out was them moving out of the first london apartment & dan rebranding, so like, spring 2017 through the gaming channel hiatus is an era where like? if you showed up then you're not a newbie, you've been around the block, but it also doesn't qualify you as fandom old bc the horrors were mostly over by then.

none of that is coming from a place of pretentiousness or judgement either! just being honest that nobody escaped the trenches of the past unscathed.

[vforvalensa]

This week I put out a new ttrpg called You Meet at a Fantasy Tavern, which is all about taking the awkward start of a new ttrpg campaign where you're still figuring out what the party dynamics are and how the player characters even know each other, and turning that into a whole game.

I originally wrote this for @binarystargames's minimalist game jam, and its a supplemental game meant to warm the players up for a campaign in a game with a more traditional campaign structure like dnd, or pathfinder, or blades in the dark, or lancer, or what have you. The premise of the game is a play on the old dnd trope where the party meets for the first time in a fantasy tavern (although rules as written the meeting place can be whatever you need to fit the genre of your game) and the players draw cards to ask each other questions and get put in Situations that flesh out the relationships between the characters and why they hang out.

Playtesting this game was a lot of fun and we kinda discover in playing that YMFT is also a really effective improv exercise that gets you comfortable playing in character with a new pc really fast and we came up some really fun pcs, like Fish Boy Detective here, which is the character I've most enjoyed playing in a minute.

Check it out there are still a bunch of free community copies available.

[moonchild-in-blue]

Okay but. You can very much explain why the beavers from Narnia had marmalade.

If you go back to the very first (chronological) book on the series, "The Magician's Nephew", when Aslan creates Narnia, you'll know that the very first King and Queen of Narnia are humans from our world - cab driver Frank and his wife Helen.

Frank is accidently pulled from the streets of victorian London alongside the main protagonists (and a broken lamp who will become THE lamp Lucy finds much later), and witnesses the birth of Narnia. By the end of the book he is crowned King by Aslan, who brings his wife to reign with him. Aslan then proclaims that humans (children of Adam and Eve) are to be the permanent rulers of Narnia - so Frank and Helen's descendants.

Given they are two perfectly ordinary, middle-lower class humans, it is very likely they have introduced British cuisine to Narnia. Helen was a housewife and would know how to cook and bake a lot of things - including how to make jam from scratch. I don't doubt these recipes have been passed down to their children and the generations to come, as well as the royal court (Helen probably taught everyone how to cook), and by extension, the rest of Narnia. She probably even wrote a cooking book to be kept in the royal kitchen.

That's why we see the dwarves and fauns and beavers and everyone else eat "human food" - most specifically, whatever typical English food was popular in the early 20th century.

And that's why the beavers have marmalade - all thanks to Queen Helen and her English customs :)

Fuck that post going around saying "you can have coffee in your story without justifying it :) you don't need to explain everything :)" I want, no, I DEMAND a fully researched ethnobotanical paper on every single food item in your work, if you don't explain to me where did potatoes come from in your fantasy setting or don't explain how the industry of coffee works over interstellar distances with full detail you are doing things wrong and I personally hate you and I hate your stupid story, fuck you

[f-lorui]

short game i made for the micro game jam: magic, with the prerequisite "death is your friend"

or in this case, your girlfriend :]

it placed #8 overall out of 75 entries and #1 for presentation, i made all art, code, and music by myself in two days ! had tons of fun with this silly little thing

play for free on itch.io in browser or download for windows

[jamsjamming]

One of the micro fixations of mine for the past half year were Game Jams. So here are the interesting Jams Q3 and Q4 2025:

Mystery Game Jam (https://itch.io/jam/mystery-game-jam-2025)

Mystery, investigation, red herrings... Somebody killed the governor? I bet it wasn't the gardener. April 4th 2025 to May 5th 2025

Short circuit VN Jam (https://itch.io/jam/short-circuit-vn-jam)

Robot, cyborgs, android, AI (not the prompter one) all deserve some love and affection. May 1st 2025 to August 1st 2025

Josei and Otome Jams (https://itch.io/jam/josei-jam-2025 and https://itch.io/jam/otome-jam-2025)

Romantic, adventurous, for "female gaze". what else is there to wish for? May 1st 2025 to July 1st 2025 

Love is unconventional Jam (https://itch.io/jam/love-is-unconventional)

Ok, I've been on this website long enough to know that this one is right up your valley, guys. We all here have some kind of attachment to very non-human characters (and most of the time also with very questionable morals) June 1st 2025 to August 16th 2025 

Mythology VN Jam (not confirmed) June

SuNoFes (not confirmed) July

Monstrous Desires Visual Novel Jam (not confirmed) August

Spooktober Visual Novel Jam (not confirmed) September

Once Upon A Time VN Jam (not confirmed) October

PolyJamorous (not confirmed) November

[wanderingandfound]

You know how in Great British Bake Off these really good, but amateur, bakers flounder and head-scratch when it comes to the technical? And as the season goes on fewer and fewer instructions are listed?

That's what rules-light and micro-TTRPGs are like.

[frogmagog]

New game I put out for a 36 word RPG jam, about heroes and the tales people weave around them.

[aclypse]

aclypse has finally taken part in her FIRST EVER visual novel GAME JAM in late October,  Ternox announced a Ukrainian Micro Visual Novel Jam. one sprite. one background. one soundtrack. 1000 words limit. how did aclypse conquer this challenge? and... has she even managed to finish the game? aclypse decided to try many new things on her visual novel. poetry. unique visual style. coding.

[seat-safety-switch]

You might think that it's really dumb to be using fancy computer technology to solve regular-ass problems. Well, the board members and amphetamine-laced stock speculators think it's really dumb to be not giving them a ton of money. Maybe both of you are right.

Last week, my city announced that they were going to use drones to figure out when traffic is backed up. Those drones will be launched by a person, who will have to drive to the traffic jam and fly the drone out of their car. It is only through the magic of the drone that it is possible to identify the heretofore mysterious state of "there's a lot of fucking cars here."

This development was heralded as forward-looking innovation, unlike traditional municipal responsibilities such as "building a train." That's old technology, from the age of coal and steam. Shooting buzzing AliExpress drones at angry people trying to get home from work? Visionary shit.

Now that we live in an incomprehensible hell made up entirely of interlocking micro-hells, a lot of folks just like you are looking around and going: who do we blame for this? Politicians have their ideas, sure. It's mostly "not our donors," which is understandable, because nobody wants to point the fingers at the guys they spend all weekend with on the golf course as being the harbingers of a mechanized apocalypse.

Personally, I'm looking even forward-er than that. Did you know there is actually no law in my city against using one of those electrified flyswatters to knock down the traffic drones? All you need is to tape one on the end of a couple broomsticks and you can knock one of those things right into the bed of your truck, stunned, with just a little practice. Once you sell what's left of them on eBay to foreign dictators or regular perverts, you can afford a gently used Xbox. Hey, maybe technology was the answer after all.