Bubble Up and Go, aka B.U.G., is a single-player Start-of-2025-Empowering game. It has been a rocky start this year, negativities are around us! In this simulation, players have to navigate through negativities, learn to keep a safe distance to toxic influences, and purify them with positive energy! Hope all of us have a great rest of 2025. Bubble up and let’s go already!
This year’s them is bubble.
How convenient! Before attending the global game jam today at our site, I stopped by Michael’s. I went there to see if I could find a cheap snow globe kit for a summer project that I was working on. There were a few interesting things I found there but they were either two big or too fragile for the project. I eventually decided to go with a clear plastic 3-Part Mold that was on sale. It has the right size and super cheap. The universe was aligned that afternoon because when I arrived, I found out the theme for this year’s Global Game Jam was, guess what!?, bubble!
Okay, I have to make something to answer the calling!
I also relearned math in the process (in English!), for example, in a triangle, the line that goes from one angle to the middle of the line between two other angles is called a median. The other one I relearned was the circumcenter of a triangle which is the point where the triangle’s three perpendicular bisectors meet. It’s also the center of the circle that passes through all three vertices of the triangle, called the circumcircle.
Translating them into Visual Scripting was also very fun. I had done a similar experiment with C# in 2013 when those tablet toys were popular. The relation between the 3 angles is different for different triangles and, therefore in theory, can be used as identifier. The debugging is a little tricky because the multitouch feature can’t be tested directly inside of Unity editor.
With the bubbly controller in mind, the first few things that came to me was protection, activation, attraction and repeal. This probably came from my memory of playing WoW. Bubble up = 0 harm.
Here are an initial set of rules to situate the gameplay and most of them are based on the felt.
- the player (soul unit) can attract good energies and repeal negative ones
- negative energies (disaster clusters) will randomly pop up in proximity to the player
- bullets with positive energy will shoot out of the front of the soul unit to repeal any disaster cluster they hit.
- a successful hit with a bullet will generate points and enlarge the soul unity over time
- when points reach a threshold, the player can release a map attack that whips out all the disaster clusters nearby.
Global Game Jam 2025: https://globalgamejam.org/group/11573/games
Over the course this weekend, 21 students, 1 faculty, and 1 alum (my one and only Bryce!) made 7 games in total, super awesome!
We played each other’s games at the end, all of my overthinking and tech-savvy game mechanics were immediately humbled by other players. For example, the bubble controller can also control the rotation of the soul unit. I wanted to use the rotation for something so I added a mechanic which shoots out a energy bullet from the front to repeal disaster clusters. It was not very intuitive, and players had a hard figure out what’s going on there including where the front is. I should of just let the soul unit do what bubble do the best which is to bounce with other disaster clusters directly. I missed frequent playtesting so much!
I am planning to add a few more things:
- Soul unit can be hurt by nearby clusters – decrease points?
- Bounce instead of shooting energy?
- a better theme