Kenny Jam 2025 & Solar Charged

I've participated in my first ever Game Jam! This has been something I've always wanted to do, and I'm quite happy that I was finally able to take part in one. One of the main reasons that I wanted to join was to just take a dive into the deep end of game development. I've dabbled a bit with development for a while now, but had yet to make an actual game until now. Having a set theme and deadline was a great way to push myself and see what I could create in a short amount of time.

The Kenny Game Jam 2025 was the perfect opportunity for me to do this. One of restrictions of this game was that you could only use premade Kenny Assets. This turned out to be another great way to learn game developement as it removed a lot of time that would've been used to create unique assets.

The theme for the jam was "Power". This theme was very vague, but eventually we landed on an idea for a Tower Defense game where you must manage your resource of "Power". Before this, we had many ideas, but the limitations of the jam, namely the asset restrictions, prevented us from creating some of our other ideas. One of our other ideas was a puzzle game where you had to use various ways to move electrical power from one point to another.

Overall, I had a great time participating in this jam. I feel like I succeeded in my goal of learning more about Game Development, and I am quite interested in making more games. The GMTK Game Jam is about a week away now, and I'm very excited to apply what I learned from this jam to that one.

For the jam, I teamed up with a friend of mine. The concept of our game is a Tower Defense game where you must manage your resource of "Power". This "Power" is not only your health, but also a resource that your towers need to keep shooting down enemies.

The name Solar Charged came from the source of your power, which is solar energy. To tie into this theme, we implemented a weather system. While the enemies attack you at night, the weather during the day determines how much power you will regenerate before you're attacked again.

We made the game in the Godot Engine. As stated in the previous section, one of my goals was to learn more about Game Developement. One of the many things I learned is that making games is hard. We worked for 35 out of the 48 total hours of this jam, yet our game was still lacking some polish and key features. I truly respect all Game Developers out there.

Despite this, I am quite proud of the what we accomplished for our first time making a game and in such a restrictive format as well.

For anyone interested in playing the game, you can either check out it's itch.io page, or check out the page here on my website.