Game Jam Project
Made with Unity
A first-time 48-hour game jam project built around abandoned beginner Unity projects. The strongest part of this piece is not raw polish, but team coordination, scope recovery, and turning a failing direction into a coherent finished game that placed highly out of 442 submissions.
Watch Playthrough Play on itch.ioAbout the Project
Made with Unity was created for the Unity anniversary game jam, where the theme was "timeless" and the brief encouraged teams to reuse old Unity tutorial assets. Our angle was to build a game about the kinds of abandoned beginner projects that end up forgotten in folders while people are learning the engine.
The finished game is built around a central hub and three short disconnected worlds, each representing a different unfinished first attempt at making a game. That structure was not just a thematic choice. It became the way we rescued the project once it became obvious that the original plan was too vague, too ambitious, and not going to survive a 48-hour schedule.
Why this project stands out
- Directed a first-time 48-hour game jam team and helped carry the project through a major mid-development re-scope.
- Turned production weakness into the core premise by reframing rough, disconnected levels as abandoned beginner projects rather than trying to force a cleaner structure we did not have time to build.
- Shipped a complete playable web build with intro, outro, hub, and three themed worlds despite severe scope cuts and limited jam experience across the team.
- Placed #27 out of 442 overall, including #14 in Narrative Design and #23 in Uniqueness / Creativity.
My Contribution
I acted as the unofficial director and central coordinator on the project. I came up with the core concept, the narrative framing, and the eventual re-scope that gave the game a coherent identity once the original idea started falling apart.
On the implementation side I was directly responsible for the intro and outro sequences, the main hub area, lighting, VFX, portal effects, camera setup, and several smaller interactions including the pulse effect used when interacting with objects and environmental responses like lanterns lighting up.
Level Overview
The final build consisted of a central hub and three short themed worlds. My direct visual ownership was strongest in the hub.
The Mid-Jam Recovery
The strongest part of this project is not any individual mechanic. Midway through the jam the game was in a bad state: the scope was too large, the direction was unclear, morale was low, and the individual levels felt rough and disconnected.
The solution was to stop fighting those weaknesses and turn them into the core idea. Instead of pretending the levels belonged to one polished experience, I reframed them as three separate unfinished beginner projects connected through a meta-narrative about forgotten first games. That let us cut aggressively, simplify the mechanics, stitch the pieces together through dialogue and presentation, and actually finish something coherent.
Production Constraints
First-Time Jam Team
None of us had done a game jam before. That showed up mostly in planning: the initial scope was too optimistic, task structure broke down under pressure, and a smaller core ended up carrying most of the work.
Constant Coordination
Most of the jam was coordinated live over Discord, with GitHub used for version control. The original project-management structure fell away pretty quickly, so keeping everyone moving in roughly the same direction became part of the real work.
Web Build Size Limit
One of the biggest technical problems near the end was getting the project under the Unity Web build size limit. We managed to trim it down with only minutes to spare before submission.
Presentation Work
A smaller but surprisingly awkward task was the opening shot where the Unity logo appears as a flat 2D mark before the cube breaks out of it and becomes the player character. Getting that perspective match to work cleanly took more iteration than expected.
Playthrough
Outcome
What makes this project worth keeping is that we finished it, submitted on time, and managed to turn a shaky first-time jam into something complete enough to place highly.
Out of 442 submissions, the project placed 27th overall, 14th in Narrative Design, 23rd in Uniqueness / Creativity, 59th in Sound Design, 60th in Art, and 96th in Fun Factor. For a first jam with a team learning as it went, that result was stronger than I expected.