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Last December 9th, we released Plisitol Jam Collection, our compilation of game jam games we improved over the years.
This compilation contains 10 games, and this number will grow as long as we’ll take part in game jams.. An update adding a new game is already planned...
How did this Collection come to life?
Since we’re usually not entirely satisfied of what we release at the end of a jam, we improved almost every one of our games through the years, and we will keep going and make sure they’ll stay compatible with current hardware. Some have almost no more relation to what was originally released.
Swimming Brick benefited from many improvements already: rewritten and debugged collisions, levels now created using Trenchbroom, flashlight, beautiful water shaders, ambient sounds...
We’re talking improvements like adding English and French localization replacing hardcoded strings we put there during the jam (usually in French only), better lights in 3D games, variables moved from code to assets, so that content can be added without being tied to the code, or quality-of-life improvements like an options menu for changing sounds volume or screen resolution, or better tutorials to explain the gameplay. All while making sure the games always run on the most recent Windows versions, and on the older hardware the original games had been tested on.
This adventure started around 2011, during the days I was still struggling with programming and the language I was most comfortable with was Java, that’s why the two oldest games in the compilation are Java games.
The oldest game in the Collection, a shoot them up game with two levels (and a half) made during my free time in the middle of my studies
Prince of Bricks, my first completed jam game, in 2011
Later, I’ve been using exclusively my own C++ engine I started making when I started studying computer science, which I’ve been improving since then, so much that now it can use OpenGL 3.x et DirectX12 agnostically among other properties, while still being compatible with the oldest working laptop I still have (a Dell XPS Studio 16, with a Core 2 Duo CPU, 4 GBs of RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670, running Windows 7).
It can also load glTF models or Trenchbroom-made maps, allowing me to make more visually appealing games in an easier way.
Why release this instead of a single commercial game first?
I’ve had a few game projects I was hoping to grow until they became worthy of being sold: an underwater adventure game that started life as Swimming Brick, Fire Exit which could have seemed "professional" if it had much more content (many levels, some inspired by real places using specific visuals), First Plague which could have been a full runner taking place along the Nile, with levels spread along the river and its delta each with their own specifics, CaraCara, the first game that seemed "sellable" to me, again if I added a lot more content to it...
Unfortunately, every time I was lacking time or skills: I realized you don’t become a good level designer overnight, and even if I sometimes believe I get my way around visuals, Biiscuit’s contributions add much more personality to the games, and she also lacks time to do more.
Therefore gathering the games, as they are now, seemed to me like it was making a valuable package. Since every game has little content, let’s put all the games together!
To make this bundle more appealing, I started developing a small launcher, which provides a preview of each game, using for each one a screenshot, a description of the game and its controls and a small history of how it was made, for the players who didn’t follow it on the developpez.com forums.
The result is available today on itch.io, we hope you’ll like this mix of raw jam games and almost professional games!