Global Game Jam 2025: Oh, the Places You'll Blow

on

Cover image for the game "Oh, the Places You'll Blow". Shows a girl blowing a very large bubblegum bubble, and floating away on the wind.

tl;dr: I participated with my friend in Global Game Jam 2025, and we made an endless-runner game controlled entirely by blowing into your microphone!




The jam

The theme of the jam was "Bubble".

We made this game for Global Game Jam 2025 in 48 hours.

We made all the design, code, and music during the jam.

We borrowed some opensource sounds and sprites from other places.

Screenshots


An animated GIF of a gameplay recording, showing the intro animation where the player blows their bubble until it is large enough to take the character away on the wind.

An animated GIF of a gameplay recording, showing the player (Levi) blowing into their microphone to make the character ascend and descend avoiding obstacles and collecting a bubblegum pickup.

A pixel-art image of a pink bubblegum wrapper.

Retrospective

  • I did this jam with my friend Alden, whom I've worked with on a few other jams now.
  • Alden always makes great sounds!
    • It's so much fun to pull the latest source code, and hear what's changed!
  • Alden's been learning to code recently, so he got to dig into some of the programming this time!
    • It was fun to help him learn how to do things.
    • Even with his beginner coding chops, he was definitely a net positive in terms of our team's productivity.
  • It was fun to figure out how to interface with Godot's audio-input APIs and how to work with microphones in general.
    • This isn't something I've been able to do much recently!
    • For the most part, things just worked pretty well.
    • Some caveats:
      • Earbud microphones don't pickup blowing noise well.
      • Our web build on itch.io would often not pickup microphone input when revisiting the page, until then performing another reload.
      • In order for phone mics to pickup blowing noise, you need to blow into the end of the phone, but that makes it hard to also look at the screen at the same time!
      • So we added an optional humming mode to make gameplay easier in some circumstances.
      • We also needed to allow the player to calibrate the min/max blow-threshold values for their particular mic and environment. So we added a mic calibration screen to support this.

🎉 Cheers!


This is a simple icon representing my sabbatical.

Comments

Post a Comment