Enguneer was the first ever game made specifically for a game jam.
Based Jam 2025 was a game jam that started on July 4th 2025 11:00 PM and ended on July 27th at 11:59 PM. Its theme was "Frontier" which got me pretty excited amd motivated to make a game since I love western setting and the theme seemed fitting for it.
I always want to make as much assets of my game by hand. But doing so requires a great amount of time and work. Thankfully the game jam lasted for long enough and I had no plans for that period of time.
I began actual work a day or two after the jam started. I had to come up with some idea of what I want the game to look like. The "Frontier" theme mentioned earlier doesn't mean "western" in 100%. The way I understood this word is 'exploration of unknown (american) lands' or 'journey' overall. I looked up the definition on the internet as well as some visual examples. The most common thing these images shared was a wild west caravan, which makes sense since they were used to explore and settle on the new lands. Anyways. That gave me a pretty good idea already for the main feature for the game. There had to be a wild west caravan/ coach.
I knew not to aim too high, as being too ambitious might result in me not being able to finish the game by the time the game jam finishes. I settled for a simple gun repairing simulator. I love the wild west guns, revolvers and rifles and had great motivation to make it work. I started working on the project in Unity.
First of all I made a prototype of moving coach with the background moving slowly. Then the NPCs. Then the workshop and dragging each gun part from and into the shelf, as well as moving the parts of the main gun. I have to say a great amount of programming was done with the use of Github Copilot, which I used not only to generate scripts that were way to complicated for me to make, but also to learn. If I didn't use the Copilot there, my game might have took another week to come out. Lots of game jams forbid the use of generative AI, but thankfully Based Jam allowed it, so I had nothing to worry about.
That being said, I still had a lot of work to do. For the pixel-like graphic I used Aseprite tool which is great for any level artist. I took my drawing tablet which hasn't been used for months and finally put it to good use. I enjoyed making all the cowboys, guns, emojis and whatnot. I considered it also as a lesson in pixel art (at least in some point). I think the sprites look not-so-horrible. I must have spend a couple of days just making sprites a couple of hours daily to satisfy the game's needs.
The sound effects and music originally were also made by me using Reaper and many addons within. I have absolutely 0 experience in making/ composing any music. It must have taken me another couple of days to make all the sound effects and music, but the process itself for a beginner like me was tiring. I decided to publish the game with three music pieces, two of which I accepted only because the deadline for the game was rushing me. Now the game has been updated with a better music, made by professional music-maker. I left the piece that I made for the main menu since it's the place where the player spends the least amount of time.
After two weeks of daily work on the game I published it for the game jam on my itch.io profile. My project competed against 42 other games.The games I saw on the top 5 places were mindblowing. I could easily see them published on Steam. I never made the game to win a price. Game Jam for me was a motivation trigger that pushed me and pressured me with enough time to actually make and publish a game (I guess that's the point of a game jam after all). During the voting phase a livestream was launched where the hosts of Based Jam played all of the games. I was excited to see them play my bit (end even compliment some of the things in it!). Obviously the game wasn't perfect and anybody could see it, but seeing someone else publically play my game was a great feeling.
Enguneer made me learn a lot of new things. It certainly raised my knowledge and level of programming, art and sound design, as well as publishing. As of now There are no planned updates for the game (even though the game is still in its demo phase and finishes after interacting with 4 NPCs). There are a lot of things roght now I see about the game that could be improved, but I do not possess any motivation at the moment to do so. If you played it I hope you enjoyed it and thank you for playing!