Return to Your Roots was created during my first-ever game jam, the Global Game Jam, and it marked not only my introduction to the format but also my first time developing a game entirely online. Built in just three days, it was never going to be an ideal production, and my teammate and I still look back on it with a mixture of amusement and affection. Despite its rough edges, the project had some genuinely interesting ideas that made it a memorable experience.

The jam’s theme that year was “roots,” and I was genuinely pleased with how we chose to interpret it. Rather than exploring roots in the literal or ancestral sense, we designed a game where the player regresses to their origins, becoming weaker as the game progresses. The player begins as a mighty tree capable of stopping time and firing powerful lasers, but with each boss defeated, they lose one of these abilities. Their form simultaneously devolves, from a fully-grown tree to a sapling and, finally, to a powerless seed. The game concludes with the player facing the same tutorial boss that once posed no challenge, now a formidable and wildly difficult final opponent, a reversal of power that underscored the game’s theme of decline and inevitability. The way we flipped the inevitability of time into a reversal of time was equally interesting, as it presented an unconventional approach to that theme and idea.While the execution was imperfect, I still find this concept to be an elegant game jam theme interpretation.

Visually, I also remain fond of the game’s juvenile pixel art style. In particular, the second and third bosses, a sentient hourglass and a wizard who shifted between a baby and old age, were conceptually strong and fit perfectly within the narrative of time and decay. The art direction, though simple, captured the surreal, allegorical tone we were aiming for.

That said, the game’s development process and final implementation were riddled with beginner mistakes. Because it was our first jam, we lacked even the most basic workflow infrastructure. Without version control in the form of Github, we had to pass the Unity project back and forth via Google Drive, which led to countless overwrites and inefficiencies. My inexperience with Unity coding also showed, as I wrote much of the gameplay logic as frame-dependent rather than time-dependent, resulting in inconsistent behavior across systems. On top of that, the game completely lacked audio or music, leaving it feeling unfinished and lifeless. The combat system suffered from similar oversights: the punch hitbox was positioned far from the character’s actual arms to make the game slightly more forgiving, however, as a result, players appeared to damage enemies by punching the air. It looked absurd and broke immersion entirely. This could have been consolidated by simply having the punch animation feature the player sprite extending their arms to cover that hitbox, or even particle effects to cover the deadspace. Weak UI and minimal tutorialization compounded the issue, leaving players unsure of how to interact with the game. That experience, however, became an invaluable lesson, as ever since, I’ve made it a priority to treat tutorialization as a core design element, even within the time restrained environments of a game jam production, ensuring that players can intuitively and engagingly understand the systems in front of them, no matter how short the development timeline is.

Looking back, Return to Your Roots is the kind of game that probably only works within a game jam context. Its central mechanic, becoming weaker as you progress, is conceptually fascinating but mechanically frustrating. Punishing players for advancing, and stripping away their abilities, runs counter to what makes games satisfying. Expanding this project into a larger scope would have required reworking its entire design philosophy. As it stands, the game serves better as an experiment in theme-driven design than as a blueprint for a longer experience. If I were to revisit it, I would focus solely on quality-of-life improvements and stronger game feel: adding sound, tightening feedback, and cleaning up animation and combat. For all its flaws, Return to Your Roots remains an important milestone: a rough, chaotic, but earnest start to my journey as a designer.

David Gadelkarim's Game Design Portfolio

Games

Contact