Overview

This was our first ever game jam. We've always wanted to participate in one, and the Kenney Game Jam 2025 was a perfect place to start. The challenge was that we had to make a game using only free assets from Kenney Assets (Kenny is the goat btw. Highly recommended). Since we've only done tutorials before, we thought it would be a bit easier if we didn't have to worry about assets or anything else (even though I did make the soundtrack).

Regardless, we went into this not knowing much besides basic some Godot. We've been programming for a while before learning Game Dev so at least we weren't entirely clueless.

The Game

The theme was "Power". We had a lot of ideas early on, but we couldn't find good assets to make most of them. We eventually landed on a tower defense game where "Power" is both your health and your currency. We called the game "Solar Charged" because your power is regenerated through solar energy (and we thought it sounded cool). There is a simple weather system where the day cycle determines how much power you regenerate before the next enemy wave hits at night.

In reality, it's pretty bad design because you can't really plan around the weather at all. It's just random and doesn't really fulfill the resource management fantasy as much as it could. We also never explain what any of the tower types do so that's just up to the Player's trial and error to figure out.

Conclusive Thoughts

We worked around 35 of the 48 available hours. It was exhausting and the game was still lacking a ton of features and polish by the end (you couldn't leave a level once you started, the only way out was death or winning which never happened due to our horrible balancing).

We see this game as more of a learning experience than anything. It was a great way to actually make something and get out of the phase of just doing tutorials. I think we learned a lot about how useful a good design can be and how to use systems like state machines. We also learned a lot about scope and how to make sure we were building the most important features first (our next game will have a menu don't worry).

Overall, we were pretty happy with how the game turned out for our first jam. It set the foundation for our future projects and helped us escape tutorial hell. Check it out if you haven't already. It's a fun little game, and we learned a lot from making it (excuse the jank though...).

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