Box Boi

Box Boi was my entry into a 48-hour game jam in November 2019 — one weekend to go from nothing to a playable Unity game. The clock was the enemy just as much as whatever was on screen.

I handled everything solo: visual design, C# gameplay, and whatever weird ideas felt funny at 2 a.m. Game jams are still my favourite way to build — the constraints force you to commit, ship, and move on.

The concept

A tiny box character in an endless runner world with hazards that escalate fast. Simple on paper, chaotic in practice — including, somehow, Nicolas Cage’s face as an obstacle. That is what happens when creative decisions get made at jam speed and nobody is there to tell you no.

What I built

• Endless runner loop — movement, spawning, collision, and difficulty that ramps instead of plateaus.
• Solo art pass — characters, backgrounds, and UI in Photoshop, then straight into Unity with no time for a proper pipeline.
• C# gameplay scripts — player control, hazard behaviour, and game-over flow written while the art was still changing.
• A complete build — menu, play state, fail state, and enough juice that it felt like a game, not a tech demo.

Stack

Unity and C#. Constant context-switching between Photoshop and Visual Studio, with no room to second-guess scope. If a feature did not survive the first implementation pass, it did not ship.

Jam rules

Forty-eight hours means ruthless cuts. Polish waits. “Maybe later” means never. Box Boi is scrappy and weird — not portfolio-perfect, but exactly what a jam should be: finished, playable, and honest about the deadline that made it.

What I took away

You can ship a complete game in a weekend when you stop overthinking. The gameplay video on this page is from the jam build — proof that a silly idea with a hard deadline beats a perfect idea that never leaves the project folder.