UMass Winter 2021 Game Jam Winner Submission

View the submission here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/479763530/

Over 30 participates competed in the UMass Winter Game Jam Contest of 2021. My roommate and I won this weekend jam with “Jumpkick Revolution” (definitely not Divekick).

The goal was to create a simple web-based game in Scratch. My roommate and I decided to make a Divekick clone, as it seemed within our scope and we loved the original game.

We quickly made a prototype, but were immediately hit with our biggest challenge: Scratch is slow. The key to fighting games, in my opinion, is in their responsiveness and impact. The immediacy of a punch after pressing a button. The feedback, both audio and visual of hitting an enemy. This responsiveness was essential to making our fighting game worth playing, but Scratch is not a powerful engine. So how would we solve this?

After some research, we found a technique called, “single-frame looping” that promised to dramatically increase our responsiveness. After searching up how to implement this in Scratch, we wrote our game under this paradigm and the results were immediate.

We managed to create our own pixel art for each asset and our own sound effects as well. On the last day, we create an arena mode with random enemies that would spawn and attack the player. We purposely made it difficult, as we felt that would give the mode the most replayability and be the most fun to play in the UMass Game Dev club after the jam was over. We also added a wall jump feature to add some depth to the gameplay.