TRAIN JAM 2017
Train Jam is a 52-hour game jam that takes place on a train from Chicago to San Francisco. With no wifi, you’re fully offline and fully reliant on the people around you — which makes it a uniquely collaborative, chaotic, and creative environment. I joined as a game designer and the primary artist on my team.
The theme that year was “Unexpected Anticipation.” A potential snow delay in the Rockies shaped everyone’s interpretation of the prompt, including ours.
This project was a fast, collaborative art sprint — a chance to build something small, weird, and delightful with a group of strangers on a train.
Our team created Tough Spudder, an endless-runner platformer where you play as a potato navigating risk-reward level choices. Taking damage peels your potato’s skin; losing all layers ends the run. Players can regain skin by replaying the level where they lost it, adding a simple but strategic loop to the gameplay.
My contributions included:
Game & level design: Shaping mechanics, enemy behaviors, and level challenges to balance difficulty and playability within the time constraint.
Art, sprites, and animation: Creating the visual style, character design, world elements, and all animations in a pixel-art aesthetic.
