False Vacuum was a submission to the University of Washington’s 2025 Tri-Campus Game Jam. Created by Adi Nadarajah and Vincent Li (me). In only a team of two and one week to work on the project, we managed to win 2nd place amongst the 20+ entries.

You can download and play the game here: https://laptic.itch.io/false-vacuum (Windows only)

Programs used

Info

False Vacuum was my first game jam, so I didn’t know what I was expecting when going into it. Each team is given a week to make a game under the same theme, and this year’s theme was DELAY THE INEVITABLE.

The judges for the game jam were ranking the games based on 6 different criteria, these being:

• Theme: How well your game integrated the theme of the game jam.
• User Experience: The level of enjoyment that a player has from playing your game.
• Creativity/Design: How unique is your idea and if your game has a cohesive and responsive design.
• Graphics: The practicality, execution, and beauty of the graphics.
• Audio: The quality of your game’s audio and its implementation.
• Completion: The overall polish and stability of your game and its components.

We designed False Vacuum with these criteria in mind, knowing that our game would be ranked based on these categories.

Being a interdisciplinary artist, I took care of all the visual and audio elements of the game.

Theme

Designing the game with the theme “Delay the Inevitable” in mind was a difficult task at first. It was hard to come up with a unique concept for the theme, because it felt so straightforward. But in hindsight, it was likely due to my partner and I being more interested in the other potential options; so we were dismayed when the actual theme was revealed.

In the end though, we liked a space themed dating-sim that we came up with for one of the other potential options, and decided to integrate the rough ideas from that into the final idea.

Something inevitable and space related made us think of the end of the universe, and one theoretical end is a phenomenon called “vacuum decay”, which is what became the main basis for our game’s conflict with delaying it.

That made us come to the idea of leading a group of planets trying to outrun this inevitable end. You can buy more time but you can never run forever.

User experience

User experience is something that we didn’t take lightly. We wanted the weapons to feel nice and the player to move in a satisfying way. We spent a lot of time fine-tuning the character movement before we got the other systems in place.

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Over time, we added more features and even sent the game to a few friends to playtest!

Creativity/Design

While designing the game, we wanted it to be unique to stand out, but familiar enough that it would be easy to pick up and play. We were inspired by other titles such as Star of Providence and Enter the Gungeon, but to make our game different and to also make use of the theme, we made some notable changes:

• You are constantly on a timer. If it reaches 0, you lose.
  • You can spend the money gained from defeating enemies or looting treasure to either buy upgrades or to buy more time. The choice is yours.
• The game is very fast-paced. You have a dash ability with a short cooldown to make it across the map faster.
• The map is revealed to you as you move, but you can see where the location of the end portal is at all times with a handy mini-map.

These design changes made our twin-stick shooter have a great sense of urgency where the goal is clear to the player at all times. This helped us stick to the theme of the game jam, to move fast and delay the inevitable as long as you can.

Graphics

I was in charge of creating nearly all the sprites and visual assets in the game. Most were hand-drawn animations, but some were created and animated with vector tools.

For the artstyle, we settled on a scrap-book aesthetic by using rough outlines and uneven fills for the drawings. The lines in the drawings jitter constantly at a slow frame-rate, combined with the frantic scrap-book drawings helped to give the game a sense of unruly chaos, as the universe is falling apart.

After creating the animation, I would export the animation as an image sequence, before compiling them as a sprite-sheet:

Audio

Creating audio for False Vacuum was also one of my main tasks. I made all the music and most of the sound effects with FL Studio.

Given that the setting of the game is in space, I wanted to use lots of electronic sounds or sweeping instruments to convey a sense of vast coldness.

Most of the tracks had a melancholic feel to them, as this end of the universe isn’t really a happy ending.

Completion

While we managed to get the core gameplay loop done, my partner and I still had to cut a lot of content that was planned on the last day because there was no way we could fit everything in a week’s time. My biggest regret is not being able to implement character dialogue into the game, as I spent a lot of effort creating the different portraits for the planets featured in the game.

Regardless, the game was in a complete state by the end, as the dialogue wasn’t necessary to the gameplay; though, it still would’ve been nice to have ;(

Conclusion

Getting second place was shocking, because there were some really great entries to the event all around. This was certainly one of my favorite things I’ve ever done, and I hope to attend more game jams in the future!

Through this event, I learned a lot about creating game assets, managing my time, and most of all: stepping out of my comfort zone and trying something new.