What is a Game Jam?
Game jams are like controlled creative chaos: developers, artists, musicians, and designers all sprint to make a playable game in a tight time frame. This jam ran from Wednesday evening to Sunday night, giving us just under five days to brainstorm, build, polish, and submit a full game. As always, it was a wild ride of caffeine, code, and creativity.
Looping In: How the Theme Shaped Our Game
The theme dropped Wednesday evening: “Loop.” A simple word, but with huge potential. Our first 30 hours were all about brainstorming, tossing around ideas, sketching rough concepts, and asking questions like: What kinds of loops are satisfying? How can we twist that idea into gameplay?
We landed on a chaotic, fun concept: a snake-like game on a looping 3D sphere, starring a raccoon. We called it L.O.O.P., short for Litter Operations On Planet. Because raccoons deserve acronyms too.
Building the Raccoonverse: From Sketch to Sphere
The first big challenge was getting the spherical movement to feel right. Traditional Snake games are grid-based and flat, but ours had to wrap around a globe, in full 3D. That meant new logic for tail-following, obstacle detection, and camera movement.
Once the movement was working, we layered in obstacles: trees, rival raccoons, and - of course - your own ever-growing tail. The planet gets crowded fast, forcing the player to think ahead and navigate with precision... or at least with panicked improvisation.
Meanwhile, we worked on visuals and vibe. We wanted it to feel a bit messy and unpredictable - true to the raccoon lifestyle - so the world is bright, playful, and full of litter waiting to be collected.
Power-Ups, Polish, and Planet Chaos
As the jam progressed, we added extra features to spice things up:
- Power-Ups: Temporary boosts that help you escape tight spots, grow faster, or increase the chaos.
- Obstacles: Trees block your path and force creative routing.
- Enemies: AI-controlled rival raccoons who will block, bump, or just annoy you.
- Loops Everywhere: The snake-like mechanics (you loop, you lose), a spherical looping world, rival raccoons that reset the trash cycle, and recursive game/code loops. Even the name "L.O.O.P." reinforces the theme.
These elements brought the world to life and gave players more ways to interact with the chaos around them. Every new mechanic had to be tested, tweaked, and sometimes cut (RIP Orbital Ouroboros Slingshot idea), but in the end, it came together as a cohesive (and slightly trashy) experience.
The Final Push: Trash Everywhere, Sleep Nowhere
As always, the last day was a blur of debugging, tweaking, and praying the final build didn’t crash. There were tail bugs, power-up placement issues, and one terrifying moment where the camera spun into the void - but we pulled it together.
We hit Submit just before the deadline with only minor raccoon-eye syndrome and a lot of pride. Out of ~38,000 participants and 9,770 submitted games, we’re thrilled to have our weird little trash-collecting raccoon out there in the wild.
Now Live: Community Ratings Open!
The jam may be over, but the fun’s not done yet! Community ratings are open for one week, and we’d love for people to check out L.O.O.P., play it, and share their thoughts. This jam reminded us why we love doing this: small ideas growing into full worlds, tight timelines pushing creative limits, and the thrill of making something weird and wonderful in just a few days. If you want to see a raccoon spiral into madness (and trash), go give L.O.O.P. a try!
Play L.O.O.P. and Vote
