I thought I'd give these itch.io devblogs a go.  Recently I entered Atari's "I, Rebel" game jam, a Jeff Minter themed jam where the theme was "The Perfect Beast".  If you don't know Jeff Minter, he has been combining classic arcade action with heady rave-inspired graphics & sound effects, and numerous references to Llamas, Sheep, etc (hence the theme) since the 8-bit home computer days, and is still at it.  The "I, Rebel" title is a nod to Jeff's unique take on games, and the just been released I, Robot game re-imagining.

The jam was to last 7 days, although due to time differences etc there was a bit of confusion on this, and I entered my game 1 day early - I was too tired to continue!  As is normal, theme was released as the jam started, but different to normal, a game idea formed in my mind almost immediately.  Something like Jeff's title Llamatron (based on Robotron arcade game), but with the ability to create beasts from different beast parts.  The beasts would all be hoof-ed animals - ungulates - to keep it Jeff Minter themed.  I had the idea that beast parts would drop from the top of the screen, you could pick them up, and drop them in a 'template' area which when filled with the right bits, would produce your beast with great fanfare.  I thought using JetPac's (ZX Spectrum arcade style game) mechanism for creating rockets would work well here.  With that idea formed, I rushed straight into it.

I'll list my bsky posts here, because that's the closest thing I've got to diary entries, and I'd like to show how the process happened:

12th April 2025

First day of Jeff Minter game jam - theme: The Perfect Beast. Got a basic gameloop going, with temporary main sprite pinched from a minter game. Next to add a weird feature that fits the theme.

13th April

Here is the weird feature to fit the Jeff Minter #gamejam theme (The Perfect Beast). May I introduce the BeastBuilder.

15th April

Had a busy couple of days - adding my programmer art, funky backgrounds, sound, kinda-sorta-proper control around levels & scoring. It looks a lot better when its moving.

17th April

Time for the finishing touches, and then adding as much content as possible in the time left in the #atari #jeffminter #gamejam. Here is the title screen.

And that was it for posts.

You can see in the first screenshot I was using a Defender sprite as enemy place holders, a sprite from Jeff's Llamatron sequel "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" as the main character placeholder.  The bolts the character is shooting were cycling through colour palette's really fast which was a common effect in old arcade games and looks quite nice, but doesn't look great in static screen grabs.  The same can be said for the background patterns that appear in the 3rd screenshot - they are all animated and colour cycling.  In fact I had a lot of fun experimenting with these backgrounds, and ended up with some cool effects that look almost shader-like.

I used ChatGPT from the start to gather information on Jeff Minter games (I'm not familiar with his pre-Atari ST work), various info on hoofed animals, classic arcade games etc.  I found a great tool to brainstorm ideas and things.  Towards the end of the week I was looking for a name.  After a bit of back and forth, ChatGPT had suggested things like:

• BeastForge: Ungulate Uprising
• Hoofcore Genesis 
• Goatwave Ascension (Bleat.  Repeat.  Transcend) 
• Ungul8tr

I initially liked the sound of BeastForge, but it turns out that name exists as a mod tool for some game already.  The name Ungul8tr grew on me, and I asked ChatGPT to generate some logos, and again after some back and forth, I settled on the one you see above - with a small edit to remove the redundant 'T'.  In fact, the menu screen needed more tinkering, and I settled on the below instead:

Much neater - and I'm quite proud of that!

A screenshot of the one of the levels, with a trippy, animated background:

You can see a Mandlebrot enemy - another nod to Jeff Minter & Llamatron.  Sadly I didn't get time to put in the screaming sound effect when it gets hit.

Speaking of sound, this game really needed a soundtrack.  I was looking for nice trance music assets to use, but found none in the time I had left.  I like to use free or cheap assets in my gamejams as I prefer to spend most of my time coding.  Most trance music I found on itch.io had price tags of $20 or more - which is fine, but not my style.  I ended up using an old tune I wrote myself (Darklight - Fade To Sky) which kinda fit the style, although it might be a bit too heavy for your average gamer.  Oh well, I was out of time.

I found a great tool for generating random arcade style SFX - JFXR- which filled in the rest of the sound department.  Oh and a few cow and sheep noises from soundcloud for good measure.  A game really comes alive when sounds are added.

And that was it - I entered the final (0.3.1) build for the jam, and now am waiting for the results.  The other games entered all look great, so I'm not expecting anything here, I just love the concentrated burst of creativity that comes with entering jams.