Gallant
Gallant is a 2–4 player local multiplayer space shooter built solo in 30 hours for the University of Bolton's game jam on the theme "Fast and Slow." A level designer at TT Games judged it the best individually developed game in the jam.
The Project
Going into the jam I had two things I specifically wanted to practice: multiplayer game development and 3D modelling in Blender, both fairly new to me at the time. Thirty hours later, Gallant shipped with 2–4 player local multiplayer, four unique abilities, three distinct ships with their own custom models and stats, an original soundtrack, and a UI I was actually happy to call polished for a jam entry.
Tying Abilities to the Theme
"Fast and Slow" became APM (actions per minute) as the mechanic tying everything together. Every time a player uses an ability, their APM rises, and the higher their APM climbs, the faster their ship moves. It rewards players who keep acting rather than sitting back, and it turns raw actions-per-minute, normally just a stat you'd track, into something that directly changes how the ship handles mid-fight.
Post-Jam Reflection
By this point I'd built up real confidence estimating what I could get done in Unity and C# within a jam's timeframe, and the soundtrack in particular came together better than in earlier projects. My main regret is build-specific bugs that never showed up during development and only surfaced in the exported build, a reminder to leave more time at the end of future jams for testing the actual build, not just the editor.
A Windows build and the full source are both up on GitHub, grab the build directly if you want to round up some friends and try it.