Here’s a game I made for this year’s Global Game Jam. For no good reason I christened it Irisa. Use your arrow keys to get your purple circle to the green pentagon while avoiding the spooky spiky things.

My goals were mostly the same as last year: keep the scope manageable, prioritize polish, make it fun. Sleep. Eat something green.

Tech-wise I stuck with vanilla JavaScript and CSS, with Vue.js thrown in to handle DOM rendering. vw and vh units keep the whole shebang responsive. Resize your browser and the game fits inside without breaking its square aspect ratio. I don’t care that other teams produced networked VR experiences written in APL, that’s Hogwarts Year 7 wizardry.

Irisa lacks instructions, which I figure is no biggie, but watching fellow developers take it for a spin suggests otherwise. Confusion is a poor first impression. Once players get the hang of it though they seem to dig the challenges. I threw together the levels haphazardly in the jam’s final hours, so the difficulty ramps up erratically; levels in the middle require far more brainpower than later ones I meant to be gruelling. Let’s say it’s a metaphor for life.

Play Irisa above or open this sucker in glorious full screen. If you’re one of those nerds who likes looking at code, take a gander at the source on GitHub. Or don’t. You do you.