Strange Places (Brackeys's Game Jam 2026.1)

Recently I participated in another game jam, the first Brackey’s Game Jam of 2026. The aim is to make a game in a week. Our team met in the official Itch.io community for the game jam about a month earlier.

This jam’s theme: “Strange Places”

I used FMOD for the implementation again because it offered me a lot of flexibility rather than having to do a lot in-engine. That said

For the entire project, I wanted to be responsible for coding the hooks for sounds and parameters in Unity, because I didn’t want to be dependent on the likely very busy programmers. It gave me a good occasion to learn more about the code side of implementation.

Swinging sounds

Once the first gameplay had crystallised in the Unity project and effects were added to the game I felt the need to add more pizzazz to swinging the sword around. Having an attack sound when swinging a sword is one thing, but the nice trailing visual effects of the sword inspired more of a shing sound. I made a short but looping drone made from metal ringing sounds and changed its volume based on the speed the sword was moving with the mouse. That lead to a pretty satisfying effect.

Footsteps

Because we didn’t end up having walking animations for our character, so I created a component shared by the player and enemies that uses the distance travelled to fire a footsteps event every x units. With a bit of tweaking, this worked perfectly. We also send a parameter based on what type character is sending the event, so theres’s variation there.

Making a game in a week is always a bit of a stressful and challenging experience, but I’m very happy with what came out. The team is currently working on another game jam, so I might have an update on that later this month.

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