Tethering Faith
My first-ever game jam!
Joined the New Year New Skills Game Jam!
The game jam lasted 7 days, 07 - 14 of January.
Me and a friend from college decided to join an international team. At the time, I had never participated in a game jam or made a game with non-Spanish speakers.
Turns out we could communicate easily, and we decided to create a 2D side-scroller puzzle and narrative-driven gothic pixel game called Tethering Faith.
Our team consisted of two programmers (including myself), a 2D artist, a composer, and a sound designer.
I took the role of lead developer and was responsible for designing the game architecture, mainly focusing on:
- Dialogue system: For learning purposes, I chose to implement a custom dialogue system. It featured my first real and “big” finite state machine, used to handle dialogue transitions and game events.
- Dialogue text generation with deterministic sounds: I developed a system that simulates character voices by playing vowel sounds based on the letters in the dialogue text. The system uses deterministic rules to map vowels to pre-recorded sound clips, creating the illusion of speech while maintaining consistency across playthroughs.
- NPC and characters system: Implemented all the NPCs, their unique interactions and events.
- Quest system: Made a simple inventory based quest system.
- Graphics: Implemented all the game shaders, cameras and parallax backgrounds.
- UI: Implemented all the game UI.
- Game state management and event system
After the jam ended, I shared the project with my Formal Languages and Computability professor. She was impressed by the FSM and automata implementations and later invited me to give a talk at my college about finite state machines and their applications in game development.
