Gamejam on Gabriel Senekovic — Game Programmer

Hex Map Generator

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Me and Jasper have been taking part in another game jam! This time, it was this jam that we took part in: Jam Link, a ten day long game jam hosted by 8 bits to infinity. They host game jams several times per year, and this one was their 47th jam in total. This was the first time that I took part in one of their jams, although I’ve been wanting to for quite a while. I am still regretful about missing the 8bit jam, and I’ve been meaning to backtrack through the previous jams and playtest previous winners sometime.

Anyway, I had wanted to make some sort of civ-like game for quite a while in order to go deeper into hexagonal maps. During my time with Short Circuit Studios, I implemented the hexagonal maps into “Teeny Tiny Towns”, and thought it was a lot of fun. I thought, I should make something myself with what I learned there. An idea I had had for a while, is a map you “build” yourself by placing hexagonal cards on preplaced tiles. I’ve rerolled this idea several times in my mind, balling with my friends who like turn-based strategy games. When this gamejam came around, I thought it a good opportunity to make a prototype in order to see what I might prefer.

I obviously had to make it speedrunnable, and the theme was “Nature”, so the idea was to make a game where you have to make druids, and you have to compete against other civilizations in order to settle a set amount of druid circles. A forest circle, a desert circle, a swamp circle, a tundra circle and a jungle circle. And I ended up making all the locations necessary (except for swamps, because I didn’t have time to implement rivers), as well as the majority of the UI. I also had the units, the production cycle and I had other civs. However, since I didn’t have time to implement the resources and the enemy AI, and I felt too stressed to figure out what to do to still make the loop work, I ended up only handing in a map generator. So obviously, we won’t win. We didn’t meet any of the requirements!

I have more things to say about the game I had planned out, but first, here is the link to the generator: Da Linky

Now, this “civclone” game is a fairly shameless copy of civ 6, mixed with elements from Crusader Kings, Stellaris and other similar games. My idea was also to assemble more reusable code I could use for my “Aleastory” project, which would be using a lot of the same things.

Queer Cards: Dice and Demis

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! A while ago, right after participating in GGJ, I also participated in the Big Mode Game jam, hosted by Video game Dunkie. This time, the team wanted to make a more art heavy game. We discussed making a TCG style game, and since our artist Jasper Falk feels more inclined towards making rendered artworks for video games, I thought the role would suit him well. I also wanted to make a card game base for my code archive. I want to make an extremely generic code archive; something akin to an engine within an engine, for Unity. This time, I worked on improving the turn based code I made for Purgatory of Greed earlier (and which I intend to backport, to make sure the archive is complete).

Gameplay-wise I tried to take inspiration from the Genshin TCG as well as other card games such as Magic the Gathering and Slay the Spire. I also had intentions to draw some ideas from Everdell. In the end, the game came out quite bare bones. Using Zenject and DOTween did speed up the process quite a lot, and it did turn out very visually appealing, in my opinion. I 3D modelled the table that one plays on as well as the dice, and I drew the borders and backsides of the cards. Jasper made a lot of the artwork on the cards, and we also had my fellow Comic artist Nikola Kubasova draw some.

As for the story and the theme, we ended up making the different elements of the cards inspired by the stripes of the original pride flag by Gilbert Baker. The meaning of these translated into game mechanics is kind of vague, but it did lead to a lot of brainstorming. In the end, we couldn’t implement most of it. That’s just one of those things about game jams. The scope is always difficult to predict, especially with only one programmer.

Since we couldn’t put in the story, I’ll brief it here: The main character was supposed to be some sort of gay knight who was fighting his way up to the king in defense of his rights to marry his boyfriend. Quite a basic story, but it suits a basic game. I’ve recently set Jasper on making character designs, so maybe I can get around to making this game presentable as well.

Here’s da linky: Da Linky

Global game jam 2025

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello!

I just participated, or rather, attempted to participate in this year’s GGJ. It was me and my friend Jasper Falk, who is an artist. We decided to make a 3D online multiplayer game. Not only was it the first time I’ve attempted to code online multiplayer in Unity (which I only got to work thanks to Hamachi), but Jasper was also not fully comfortable with 3D modeling and animation.

I have to say, coding with Netcode for Unity Gameobjects makes me want to pull my hair out. It’s difficult to understand, and I find the documentation somewhat opaque, but I also know that had I programmed this in C++ it would probably be much much worse. In the end, I’m not sure I understand the whole “ClientRpc” and “ServerRpc” thing that Unity has going on. I read what I could understand and then threw stuff at the wall to see what stuck. The game is not in a very presentable stage, significantly lacking in assets.

But I am still proud that I managed to finish so many milestones within the time limit, and learned how to debug a multiplayer game. I also learned how to connect to another computer over the internet, even if it was only thanks to Hamachi. And through trying to debug this stuff, I learned what a port is, the difference between a public and a local IP, how to ping, use nmap, telnet, tracert and netstat, etc. I spent a lot of time pinging other IP addresses before I realised that whether I could ping someone or not didn’t matter to Unity, and the reason I had an issue connecting with Unity was because… I don’t really know. But Hamachi fixed it.

Clearly I need to investigate this further. But I at least got pretty far on the way.