Trolley Problem

Really Feel Like a Problem

About

Made for the 2025 Calgary Game Developers Association Arcade Game Jam.

YOU CAN PLAY THIS NOW! I fixed it and it works now.

The Story

This silly little game with garbage SEO is a perfect culmination of the artful and delicious idea stew resulting from the in person vomit funnel. This is a terrible name for a simple and effective collaborative conceptualization process I have been using for years now, most notably during game jams.

Planning starts, from the theme, with pure slop. Random thoughts, word association, stupid jokes. Anything is allowed and encouraged except for well formed ideas. Garbage only. Once the stream of garbage starts to slow down, chunks start to form. Not fleshed out ideas, but pieces. Mechanics, themes, contexts. This progression happens naturally, but I find it very important to hold it off for a few minutes very intentionally to let things boil over. Just a bit. Then run around passing these rough ideas back and forth with all the silly little pre-formed groups to give that final stew a rich and bodied flavour.

This time around I had no plan or team whatsoever (just the way I like it), but was chatting with a 3D modeller during the kickoff so naturally we ended up on a team. With the theme shift, focusing on the wonderful physicality provided by the arcade context, we went from driving slot cars in manual to that classic Nitrome mexican bean pump car game to putting a kayak on the rails to operating a shopping cart with oars. Hadn’t planned to work together but we both stuck to the idea which, I think, is the correct way to form game jam teams.

Diverged significantly form the theme, but we made up for that by adding a secondary layer of viewing the game through a set of fixed placement security cameras you have to manually swap between to see anything.

Kink in the plan, I had loaded my entire life into a hiking backpack and biked downtown for the jam… except for my laptop charger. So, as a strange start for the jam, I biked back home, up the river valley, ate dinner, took a shower, and headed back. Didn’t get working until maybe 9:30 which is absurd. Barely had a impression of a mechanical sketch by that first night, but that extra time to cook, and a solid shot of exercise probably did more good than the extra time would’ve. I also ended up with barely a couple hours on Sunday either due to a separate event running simultaneously.

Made up for that working 8:30-4:30 on saturday though lol. At the end of that I had a really solid something together with a player controller, UI overlay with the camera, and even a gameplay loop. Really just waiting on a level to put it all in.

The wonderful modeller I was working with was going crazy with it. I’m extremely happy and a little proud of what he was able to pul off. However, in handing it off, neither of us considered the amount of unoptimized physics objects present in a fully stocked little grocery store. The game hardly ran.

So I had a build up by Saturday night, but we still ended up scrambling just to have something playable to show off. On top of that, the very physically involved rowing motion demanded by the game was simply unworkable on the flimsy unstable platform housing the controller on the demo stage. Which is extra unfortunate as we hardly got to hear the wonderfully absurd and extremely silly hyper-compressed shanty track we got from a very generous musical collaborator.

It’s fun and funny, but I’m glad it doesn’t have legs.

I’ve since fixed it up for the arcades: resolving perfomance issues, addind a “tutorial”, and implementing a range of silly little sound effects. Already have way too many projects “that I should really make into a full game”. This one doesn’t make the grade. It’s fun but doesn’t really have anywhere to go other than polish. I am very happy with that.

_{Roles: programming, design, coordination, technical art}

_{Tools: Godot, Blender}

Ancestry:

⮣ Trolley Problem
⮣ Jugghoul
⮣ Space Storm Pizza Panic
▪ YUT YUT