Global Game Jam 2026 - Andrea Blythe

Covers for the games Best Face Forward (showing the silhouette of a face with the text arranged inside) and Thomas Was NOT Alone (showing a man in a beanie and suit jacket, holding a wine glass, with pink hearts floating around his head)

Over the weekend, I participated in the Global Game Jam at the UC Davis location. I’ve done several jams in the past, but always as a solo developer. So, this was the first time I participated in a jam with the intention of joining a team, let alone at an in-person event. Quite nerve-racking.

Fortunately, everyone was wonderfully chill. The event kicked off with a presentation, with former Davis alumnus providing advice on how to approach a jam, before declaring the theme for the 2026 jam: Mask.

This was followed by a matchmaking session. The hosts (professors at the university) had a really great method for this process. Everyone present came up with a game concept based on the theme, which we wrote out on large sheets of white paper and presented to the group.

All of the pages were pinned to the wall, and everyone took three Post-it notes with our name and abilities and put them on the projects we thought we’d like to work on. It was such a great method, because it really took the pressure of the team forming process and got everyone talking.

I ended up working on two game projects — Thomas Was NOT Alone and Best Face Forward. On the first night, this created a few funny moments, when I would be talking with one group and then turn around and find myself talking with the other group. Delightfully chaotic.

Thomas Was NOT Alone

Led by Thomas Ruiz, Thomas Was NOT Alone is an FMV dating sim, in which Thomas takes the player on a date, asking pointed yes/no questions, which lead the player down increasingly chaotic places on the date. I collaborated with Thomas on writing the script and branching out the various pathways, coming up with a few of my own ideas for how the date could go wonderfully wrong.

After we finished the script, the team set up for filming in the auditorium, where it would be quiet. I served as sort of a script supervisor and performing a bit of feedback on the performance. Not much feedback was needed though, because Thomas did great and we pushed through the whole filming rather quickly.

At that point, it was up to Thomas and the rest to finish off the coding and implementation. They did a fantastic job and it turned out to be a fun game. The character is delightfully awkward and weird, and the story is funny and chaotic.

A small crew set up to film a man at a table, sitting before a green screen. — *Filmming Thomas Was NOT Alone in an auditorium.*

Best Face Forward

Led by Charlie (IRateBurritos) and Sophie (sdrozd25), Best Face Forward is a Jackbox-style multiplayer game, in which the players are presented with a prompt. They have to create a face from various parts and answer the question with a random assortment of words. Then, the players vote on which one they like best — and the one with the most votes wins!

For a long time, I’ve been rather down on my art capabilities, since it’s something I do casually. However, since what the project needed was a bunch of disconnected fragments — and I tended to draw eyes and lips and such on their own as a kind of doodling — I figured I could pull it off. I presented my idea to the team and they liked it, so I was in.

Doing the art required working in a digital format (instead of the pen and paper I was used to). I experienced a bit of fumbling at first, but taught myself how to efficiently use layers to my advantage and ended up developing a style that I liked and that would allow me to create a lot of pieces rapidly.

It was fun! And now I’m feeling more confident in my art skills, which I might be able to apply for some new game concepts that I’ve been noodling.

The heavy lifting for Best Face Forward was definitely done by Charlie and Alex (AlexGGJ42), who programmed the game. The multiplayer component definitely took the longest amount of time. Their work was incredibly impressive.

The multiplayer lobby is impressively smooth, and the UI works well. The faces assembled together are wonderfully uncanny and strange, and the word selection process is like chaotic refrigerator-magnet poetry. The end result is a game that feels like a delightful fever dream.

A set of six facial features. Left side has a normal set of blue eyes, a pig nose, and an eerily wide smile. Right side has eyes with teeth, a normal nose with a nose ring, and a mouth with an eye inside. — *Early artwork I created for Best Face forward. I like the frames, however, in the final version, it was more functional to remove the boxes and make the background transparent.*

Other Cool Games

One of my favorite parts of the jam was the final night in Davis. After all the entries were turned in, the participants were invited to set up computers around the room, so we could all mill around and play games.

*A group of folks playing the multiplayer game, Best Face Forward.*

It was so cool to see people play the games I worked on in real time. Even more fun was being able to experience the games everyone created and talk to them about their process. Here are the games I got to play:

Lost Faces. is a horror visual novel about a girl who is born without a face, so she steals them from others. Beautiful art work and sound design, along with an interesting story.

The Masked Merchant is a cozy game about selling masks in a shop. Each mask provides different benefits, and the player has to choose the right mask based on what the NPC asks for during dialog. Adorable art and a fun premise.

Photomask is an alt controler game, in which two player engage in a 1v1 competition. Each player solders a point on a computer board, then they switch boards and each player tries to trace the path and complete the connection. My first time soldering something! And I won!

Two soldering kits set up across from each other, so that folks can play the soldering game. — *Playing photomask.*

RGB Runner is an endless runner game in which you have to switch between RGB values to see the safe way to progress. It was a very cool design, though I had a hard time wrapping my head around it (especially with keyboard controls).

Identity is an adventure game in which the player has two bodies and has to put on a mask to switch between each body and progress through a series of puzzles.

XOR Puzzle is a puzzle game in which you decode the text using an XOR Cipher. Since I have no idea what that is, I struggled with this one. It was a cool and complex puzzle, and lots of folks with more knowledge than I had a great time with it.