Jamsepticeye – Death is an Opportunity

Jacksepticeye, Youtuber and streamer, hosted a game jam for Halloween during the first week of October between the 1st and 5th. That was five days; a rather typical time line for a faster paced game jam on itch.io. It was announced that the theme was to be “Death is an Opportunity.” This was left open to the interpretation of the participants. I gathered a small team of three others and myself, eventually named Lemonz, with the goal to create a Metroidvania, since at the time I had enough frameworks to spin one up as quickly as possible.

A Tiny Greek Myth Metroidvania

My team was heavily inspired by the idea of Death being a person and a concept at the same time within the same universe. Our designer came up with the mechanical core that the character is already dead, and now has ghostly powers he can use to help Charon fetch lost souls. We eventually decided upon making the game easy to understand; we didn’t want to reach the difficulty heights of Hollow Knight, our main inspiration, and streamlined the experience on our design document.

Director’s Level Design Corrections

I focused on stitching together the Corgi Engine’s existing code into the experience we needed with patches of my own. Once I completed all the scripting changes, the designer passed me his level layouts, and I made some director-level corrections, and little additions as we decided on more features to give the player more things to do or express skill with. Some of these corrections also fixed issues with platforming collisions or enemy spawn fairness.

87th Place out of Over A Thousand Teams

Jamsepticeye was full of team submissions; plenty of others had their creativity presented in many ways. For us, one failure was the marketing of our title. The Discord hosting Jamsepticeye offered the ability for developers to ask for votes, and whilst I did try to keep up to date on posting it myself, we did not actually create any fun memes or jokes like other developers did to flesh out the characters of their games. That being said, ending up in the top 100 was an accomplishment nonetheless, and a lot of friendly comments were given.

Credits for Team Lemonz

Programmer: Colin Wood
Designer: Timothy Bowers
Composer: DeltaMudkip
Artist: HoldenG