Brackey’s Game Jam 2026.1 “Gnomebody Escapes”
Overview 🗺️
This is a game I made in 5 days for Brackey’s game jam 2026.1, because I had a lot of time and even more motivation. A game jam is an event where game developers (programmers, artists, etc.) sign up to create a game in a team or solo. Typically the deadline is in a short amount of time, for this jam it was a week, however, I only had 5 days to work on it, which made it even more of a challenge. I also chose to work on the game as a solo developer so my vision for the game is not dilluted by other people (although I realize that has it’s own benefits).
The theme for the jam was “Strange Places”, which made my mind jump to a bunch of concepts, but I liked the ideas of labyrinths the most. I had been wanting to make a shooter game for a while, so that’s the genre I decided to go for. When thinking about which strange enemies I could add to fit the theme, I decided on gnomes, because they are mysterious and definitely strange.
The game takes place in a labyrinth that is randomly generated for each playthrough. The goal is to shoot all of the 100 gnomes that are running around the maze. The weapon you use for this is your fingergun, that also functions as a tracking device for finding the nearest gnome. The general playthrough time is between 5 and 10 minutes, but a time under 4 minutes is possible if you’re quick!
This labyrinth is made up of a 12x12 area with an empty 2x2 area. Each tile besides the center is picked from a pool of 4 different pieces, shown in this image:
The selected pieces are then rotated 0°, 90°, 180° or 270° randomly. This results in the possibility of a large part of the labyrinth not being accessible, which I fixed by adding an algorithm that finds all seperate areas that aren’t reachable from the location the player starts at and spawns portals in the spawn area that makes it possible to reach the seperate areas. When the map is done generating, a NavMesh (which represents the walkable area) is generated, which allows the gnomes to navigate, which is the most important aspect of the game.
Technologies Used 🛠️
- Unity
- Blender
- Paint.NET
- SLK_img2pixel
Results 📊
~9000 people signed up for the game jam, which resulted in 1432 games being submitted. There were 31700 ratings in total, which means the average amount of ratings for a game was 22.
- Overall, my game placed #136 out of those 1432
- The highest scoring category was “Enjoyment” (16th out of 1432)
- For amount of ratings, the game scored 23th (107 ratings)
Showcase 📸
Game page
Gameplay:
Conclusion 🏁
For my first game jam, the results are very good, but more importantly, I got great time management practice out of it. Besides that, I learned a lot about pathfinding logic and how to apply that in Unity.