With Halloween creeping up (and Game Off just days away), we thought you might enjoy some fun, fiendish, and forkable games that have risen from game jams over the years. For the undead uninitiated, game jams are hackathons for building games in just a few days or weeks based on a theme or some other constraint like limitations to CGA color palettes, total filesize no more than 13kB, or fitting an entire game into a 64×64 pixel canvas. They’re fun, challenging, and we’ve seen some spooktacular creations!
We’re covering 13 games with ghosts, ghouls, demons, daemons, witches, worms, and a myriad of monsters from jams like CGAJam, Global Game Jam, JS13K, LowResJam, and Ludum Dare. Play them alone in the dark, or fork them and make some tweaks to the source to give yourself an advantage. We’ve provided a few cheat codes to get you started. 🎃
A lost wraith is wandering through the world seeking peace. Will you guide him back to his grave so he can finally rest?
Fun hack: Give yourself infinite dash-jumping abilities and get to those hard-to-reach places with ease by commenting out this.dashed = true; in player-physics.ts L#285:
Trick Parade is an RPG with a twist—through a combination of menu-based combat and mini-game mayhem, you’ll quest to become a master of tricks and scares.
Winner of 2017’s Game Off, Daemon vs. Demon challenges our hero to fight their way back to the land of the living using the W A S D keys to move and the J K keys to hack and slash.
Fun hack: Having problems getting through those tentacled felines? Limit their ability to grab you by updating GRAB_PLAYER_TIMEto a higher value in scripts/monster_1.gd#L10:
diff
var steering_control = preload( "res://scripts/steering.gd" ).new()
- var GRAB_PLAYER_TIME = 0.5
+ var GRAB_PLAYER_TIME = 1337
var grab_player_timer = GRAB_PLAYER_TIME
var steering_control = preload( "res://scripts/steering.gd" ).new()
- var GRAB_PLAYER_TIME = 0.5+ var GRAB_PLAYER_TIME = 1337
var grab_player_timer = GRAB_PLAYER_TIME
2017’s Game Off inspired a hybrid of Breakout and Pong that can get monstrously difficult.
Fun hack: If it’s too challenging to defeat the computer, hack the AI! Removing the following from script.js lines 707-710 will force your opponent to make some monstrously inefficient decisions when it comes to which balls to intercept, giving you the advantage.
diff
// Checks if there are balls attached and finds the nearest incoming ball
for ( var i = 0; i < this.balls.length; ++i ) {
- if ( this.balls[i].v[1] < 0 && this.balls[i].x[1] < nearestIncomingBall.x[1] )
- nearestIncomingBall = this.balls[i];
- if ( this.balls[i].x[1] < nearestBall.x[1] )
- nearestBall = this.balls[i];
if ( this.balls[i].bound == 2 && this.t >= 3.5 )
this.shoot ( 2 );
}
// Checks if there are balls attached and finds the nearest incoming ball
for ( var i = 0; i < this.balls.length; ++i ) {
- if ( this.balls[i].v[1] < 0 && this.balls[i].x[1] < nearestIncomingBall.x[1] )- nearestIncomingBall = this.balls[i];- if ( this.balls[i].x[1] < nearestBall.x[1] )- nearestBall = this.balls[i];
if ( this.balls[i].bound == 2 && this.t >= 3.5 )
this.shoot ( 2 );
}
Watch out for the giant floating eyeball that shoots purple laser beams in this low-resolution, metroidvania, first-person shooter. It’s even more impressive when you consider that this jam had a constraint where any game could only be a maximum of 64×64 pixels.
Built in just ten days, this polished entry will keep you entertained as you take on an evil spirit from a dark realm.
Fun hack: Windows users can navigate to the DarkForest_Data folder and rename or swap the level1 and level2 files with one another to start on the final level.
This game throws you into a virtual reality forest where you must capture runes and avoid deadly spiders.
We hope you had fun playing with these games. Did you experiment with tweaking some variables, modifying graphics, or updating the sound? We’d love to see it—reply to our post or tag us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with screenshots or videos. ❤️
The theme for Ludum Dare 48 was “deeper and deeper,” which inspired over ten thousand people to create almost four thousand games together over a weekend. As you can imagine,…
Thirteen spooktacular games to play, hack, and slash this Halloween 🧙🏻♀️ - The GitHub Blog
