MONS wins awards at SA Game Jam 2025!

I recently took part in the annual SA Game Jam 2025, organised by Free Lives. It was either a 72-hour or 48-hour affair, starting on Friday 19th September and finishing on Monday 22nd September. I wasn’t really planning to take part as I had a fairly busy weekend lined up, but started messing around on Saturday – a 2-frame walk cycle turned into a 4-frame walk cycle which turned into an 8-frame walk cycle… I didn’t work on Sunday, and finished the game on Monday.

To my absolute delight, I had something I was pretty proud of! MONS – a short interactive experience in which I got to experiment with Unity’s pixel perfect camera for the olde 8bit retro look, harnessed the power of prefabs, and a little story to go along with it.

You’re a Kaiju, and you forgot your car keys back up on land from the last time you terrorised KiffLandia hundreds of years ago. The KiffLandians have since rebuilt the city and you’re back to clumsily trample things on your way to your car keys.

I’ve been purchasing and collecting various audio packs over the years, and found a fantastic ‘Japanese’ music pack by Ovani that I used for the music in the game. I had a bunch of great explosion sounds which worked well for the buildings and water towers exploding after the Kaiju walked over them.

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The jam winning results were announced today – MONS (short for ‘Monster’ as the game jam theme was ‘You Are the Monster) won ‘Best Audio‘ and shared the prize for ‘Best Humour‘, AND got a special mention for ‘Overall‘ (ie, the game came 2nd in 70 submissions).

I’m absolutely delighted! 🥳🙏 Apart from the nice cash prizes, this is my first solo game jam. I made the decision to go solo almost exactly a year ago, and knew nothing about the coding side of things. Luckily I discovered a plugin called ‘Adventure Creator’ that allows one to do visual coding in Unity (mainly to make point & click adventure games), and it’s been a real gateway into making games.

I posted a GIF of the game on Reddit and it went semi-viral (for me at least), which was great: 1.3k upvotes with a 99.8% upvote ratio, 191 shares and 42k views (it got thousands more on other subreddits).

I’m keeping a running list of tweaks and additions in case if I ever come back to do more on it, like making a ‘path of peace’ ending for not breaking anything.

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My bro kindly made this cool unprompted video review:

And a player called ‘LUDAFOX’ made this cool video playthrough:

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Play MONS in your browser, or download for PC and MAC!

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Next up – Bru & Boegie: Episode 1 takes part in Steam NextFest, starting Monday! I am very excited for its eventual launch later this month. 🥛💥