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Mini Jam is a smaller game jam organization where they do jams every couple of weeks. They give you the theme about a week before hand and give you a limitation right as the jam begins.

For this jam, the theme was Sky and the limitation was “2 randomly chosen words.” The words were “Donut” and “Warzone” which as you can imagine would throw a wrench in most people’s ideas that they may have pre-planned. I had a difficult time getting anyone to join my group that wanted to use UE4 so I decided to attempt it on my own (I also had the help of a composer this time around).

Since I didn’t have any other designers to work with I decided to just roll with whatever ideas first came to mind design-wise. I came up with the idea of donuts that rain down from the sky and the goal is to collect more donuts than your opponent. There was also a battle aspect that would take care of the “Warzone” limitation.

At first I attempted to build out some AI enemies that you could play against but ended up scrapping that idea when I realized how much work it would be/how much time it would take to get it working correctly. Instead I decided to make the game 1v1 PvP so that I could focus on the mechanics and build out all the features/systems within the 72 hours that I had.

For the level design, I knew I wanted something that was symmetrical that would give both players the same chance of reaching the giant push-able donut in the center of the map. I also wanted to box the player’s in without the use of invisible walls so I threw rock meshes around the edge of the landscape and placed some out much further so that players got the feeling of there being more to the game world than there really was.

I’m a huge fan of “Ultimate” attacks and built in a system that allowed players to unleash a Goku style “Kamehameha” of donuts their opponent. Setting up these attacks was probably the most interesting/fun thing I did in this jam and if I could just come up with ults and build them out all day I’d love it.

I was able to complete quite a bit during the short amount of time that I had but I decided to continue working after the jam was over so that I had a more polished game. I even added another Ultimate attack, a giant donut meteor!

I’ve uploaded Donut Libre to itch.io and it’s available to play for free if you want to check it out. https://hexnite.itch.io/donut-libre

Or you can download it directly from here: https://sethrolfe.com/wp-content/uploads/Donut%20Libre%20v1.2.zip