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Cartoon mountains scene with a flying face and a pixelated character on a green landscape.
Personal — Box Boi — image 2
Personal — Box Boi — image 3
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Game DevPersonal

Box Boi

Completed20193

Overview

A solo Unity endless runner built during a 48-hour game jam in November 2019. I created the artwork and wrote the gameplay in C#.

The finished build includes menus, escalating hazards and game-over states. The gameplay recording shows the jam version.

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

The 48-hour limit made scope decisions immediate. I focused on completing the core loop and a playable build before adding polish.

What I took away

Box Boi taught me to commit to a small idea and finish it within a fixed deadline. The gameplay video on this page records the jam build.