Global Game Jam 2026

2 febrero 2026

Every year for Global Game Jam, some friends and I lock ourselves up in a library at our university, with teachers and students new and known, and make a little game to remind ourselves of why we went through the whole ordeal of getting a master's and finding a job in this crumbling industry in the first place.

In usual GGJ fashion, this year's theme did not really do anything for us, so we mostly ignored it. We made a party game for two to four players about RC cars fighting it out sumo-style. We are obsessed with Boomerang Fu and Roombattle (this one by fellow Spanish developers!) so we wanted to try our hand at making one of these. The "mask" theme gave us the idea to have a randomly chosen weapon attached to the front of the car, each with a different physics collider.

You can play the game at my friend's itch page.

This time the age old adage "don't bother with physics in a jam game" came true once again. Many hours were spent on carefully tweaking impulse values and fighting collision code. I mostly kept away from the gameplay side of things, trapped as I was in my own UI coding hell, but I saw my friends suffer through it. The end result was a very buggy and very funny physics game. We have learned nothing and will repeat our mistakes the next time.

For this jam I was the VFX / Tech artist, but I also did some UI coding and I kinda was the tech lead, as I had the most experience with Godot in the group. I want to showcase some cool things I made!

First, the explosions.

The game has a very cartoony style and I didn't have time to make any textures for VFX, so all the particles are simply primitives. Godot's GPUParticles3D has some very nice functionality that allowed me to very quickly put together some dust, boost and death particle systems. I wish the node had a nicer UI, however. All the modifiers being in a single long list makes it somewhat unwieldy.

For the death explosion I tried layering different effects and some simple camera shake to sell the impression and make it very obvious that one of the players was out of the game. I used the new-ish @export_tool_button feature to play all the particle systems at the same time in the editor. It's nice not to need a custom plugin to add basic functionality like this.

Next up, the sand shader. The game takes place on a sandbox, so we wanted a way to have big objects that were stuck in the sand blend with the environment. We didn't really use this in the end, as we decided against having big static colliders in the middle of the play area, but I had fun making it and the results are acceptable.

The trick is to lerp the fragment normal towards the normal of the ground. At first I tried reading the depth buffer to mask the blend area, but I found out that doing it based on world position was enough, and it gave me more control over the effect. Layer on top some procedural noise and sand textures I made with Material Maker and you have a pretty convincing effect!

Finally, the grass. I made this one extremely quickly, so I'm surprised it turned out this good.

Just like the sand shader, this one uses noise textures in world space to set the grass color and wind speed. The normal is again blended with the ground at the base of each blade.

The grass is a MultiMeshInstance3D node. I had never worked with it and jams are the perfect place to try new things, so I dug into the documentation and quickly put together a script to scatter grass blades outside of the sandbox. The tool button came in handy here, too. It turns out that if you don't have to fight your engine every step of the way, you can make stuff very quickly!

All in all, I am very proud of the game we made. I learned some techniques that will be useful in my main project (please wishlist Imago Season on Steam!) and all my friends did terrific work: the physics gameplay, input management for keyboard and controllers, music, UI and game flow design, and this amazing controller for two players that one of my friends made out of a shoe box and some arcade buttons:

I think this year was the most fun I've had at GGJ. It's always cool to meet the new students and see how creative they are. I played some really fun games after the jam was done!

Some final observations:

• Godot adoption is increasing every year. It makes me happy to see students are giving Unity the boot after all their asinine decisions, but it makes me even happier to know that they are turning to the FOSS alternatives.
• So many groups made multiplayer games! I wonder if it's related to the rise of friendslop games like Peak (sorry I do love that term even if it's silly). In any case, game jams should be a celebration of community. What better way to celebrate than playing with the other jammers?

With the jam done, it's now time to return to work. Until next time!