The idea behind a game jam is super-rad: Typically there’s some sort of time limit like 24 hours, 48 hours, overnight, or similar, and a theme which is revealed at the event. The theme is often vague enough to give developers a bunch of freedom, but specific enough that if you can’t typically bring existing ideas to the jam. Inside of those constraints, developers build a game which often could be described as a half-way functional prototype when it’s finished. Game jam games are often very basic (as you can’t really get much more involved than that given the time limits) but you can usually see a idea, feature, or otherwise may eventually pop up in a future project by that same developer as game jams are a great opportunity to experiment with new things.
Today, Butterscotch Shenanigans released all of the game jam games on itch.io. They’re downloadable as Windows executables, and all the games have super tiny file sizes so you can just go wild downloading them all. Bscotch has a very distinct style, which these games are all just dripping with. Even more interesting is that many of these games are from 2013 and 2014, so you’re playing the games that likely were among their earliest experiments which eventually (in very small parts) turned into Crashlands ($6.99) and the rest of their App Store game library. It’s a real neat look behind the scenes of Butterscotch Shenanigans, and feels a lot like listening to underground recordings of your favorite bands at early live shows.
