If you’ve ever participated in a game jam you know it's a wild ride and only the most disciplined make it to the end. Game jams are an excellent way to improve your skills as a developer and learn something new. 

This game jam was not an exception, because Genies Experience SDK leverages TypeScript, so C# developers had to take a moment and regear from C# to TypeScript. Many found it to be very easy and were able to get started quickly, and in just two weeks we saw such a great variety of game prototypes from the community using Genies Experience SDK. 

This game jam was special in so many ways - Genies partnered with incredible Unity creators- Sasquatch B Studios, TNTC and Jason Weiman to co-host the game jam. It offered $1,000, $500 and $250 prizes to first through third place winners and $50 to fourth through tenth place winners! AND the game jam provided $8,250 in cash bonuses to several competing developers to allow them to complete the prototypes they made during the game jam and turn them into fully-fledged experiences. We are happy to announce that all of the developers that received the offer will move into the next stage of development and will complete their prototypes. We can not wait to share the finished games with you, so stay tuned for more!

Now let’s take a look at the winners and honorable mentions of this game jam and talk about the Genies Experience SDK that powered it. 

Putting the Genies Experience SDK into developers’ hands

With the jam, we really wanted to improve developers’ workflows and get more learnings on their usage of our custom TypeScript implementation. In order to upload and publish content from Unity into Parties, we needed a language that was much more flexible than C# to create Experiences. With TypeScript, we mirrored all the libraries a Unity developer would use to make the development experience as similar as possible. In addition, we did a lot of work behind the scenes to overhaul how a Unity developer can access the SDK. Instead of using the CLI, which some developers don’t feel comfortable with, we updated our systems to use Unity’s Package Manager, making the install and update process a lot simpler. You can find our sample project on GitHub to get started quickly!

Following some initial, smaller tests with TypeScript in the SDK, we really wanted to get broad learnings from developers to understand their experience. In our own development, it’s easy to get used to and work with, but we wanted to see what would happen with a broad range of experience levels and projects. We were happy to see that using the language in Unity was smooth overall, and it was so exciting to see all of the projects being started and what people were able to build!

1st Place winner- Tower Defence vibes on a time crunch

Genies team and three Unity co-hosts that playtested and scored each submission unanimously named Swarm Cycle as our favorite game for the theme. The simple, yet clever Tower Defence mechanics of the game, the premise of racing against the clock, clean environment and cozy SFX made his game incredibly addictive. We see a lot of potential in adding mechanics that allow for social play, an asynchronous multiplayer of even a 3v3 mode! Check out the video of the gameplay to see for yourself.

2nd Place winner- Tower Climb a vertical climb game for competitive spirits!

If setting your personal best record and competing against yourself sounds like a lot of fun to you (it does to us!), then you will absolutely love Tower Climb! In this simple tower climbing game you have 60 seconds to climb. The mechanics are fun and easy to perfect, so after the first run it's a race against the clock to set your personal best. We loved the game and only wish it could feed the competitive spirits within us with a leaderboard or a 1v1 mode.  Which we hope to see come from the developer once they complete their game! So stay tuned for more. 

3rd place winner - Forever 1889

You don’t often see a game jam submission that starts with a cut scene. So when we started playing Forever 1889 and saw one, we knew we were in for a treat. The premise of the game is straightforward, yet challenging.  To beat the game you must travel back and forth in time to solve a puzzle. The unique mechanics of an action that took place in the past affect the present and add a fun spin. Job well done!

Honorable mentions

Dance your heart out!

If you’ve ever spent an evening at the arcade and most of your tickets went to the Dance Dance Revolution- this game is for you! It was definitely for us because we absolutely loved play testing the Dane Up Tower. With simple and easy to master controls and an arcade like aesthetics we see a lot of potential in this game. A 1v1 mode, Spotify integration or a camera capture to share your best moves and moments on Instagram and TikTok? This game made by Ludotesis definitely deserved an honorable mention.

A Cyberpunk Maze Runner - Race Against Time

There were so many factors that made this game interesting - from the aesthetics to the gameplay. The funnest surprise was the first time you played the game - dropping into a footrace against a bunch of bots while trying to navigate a maze of fluorescent colors really added a lot of tension to the game! It created a fun twist to platforming games - racing against not just the clock, but also other players to try and snag first place!

Candy Towers - Take Your Sweet Time

This game really leaned into the casual, arcade game feeling with a game that had such fun sounds and visuals. We found ourselves consuming candy non-stop to try and build the tallest tower possible. With all of the bright colors, the dancing NPC, and the vibrant particle effects, it was so easy to run around for minutes to try and make the score bigger!

Game Jam Wrapped / Looking Ahead

While we had a lot of fun hosting the game jam alongside our incredible co-hosts and seeing what everyone built by the end, we really enjoyed giving developers an opportunity to try out our SDK and see what they could bring to life. While our SDK is still in a private beta, this jam was a great opportunity for us to bring in a broader range of developers to the community to get their hands on it. As we ramp up for our next game jam, we’ll be putting our Multiplayer Framework in the hands of developers. In the meantime, we’ll continue improving the SDK with all the lessons learned from our first major game jam. 

If you missed this game jam or you’re interested in keeping up with our upcoming releases, be sure to follow us on X, LinkedIn, and IG to stay up to date on our future jams, developer opportunities and product announcements - more to come soon! 🖤