From around the middle of January to the end, we held the first official luxe jam for closed beta testers. You can view the entries here.

The purpose of the jam is a relaxed shared time window to make something with the engine, to give people an excuse and a soft deadline to dive in and learn, together. I think it went really well!

The main theme was plants x technology

There were other optional themes too.

In this post we'll share some of the submissions! We've also got a few quotes from people that made something. After the jam I asked them to write a one or two sentence quote about their experience:

If you jammed and want to do a sort of quote for the blog post let me know (interview is the wrong question, more of a spotlight style comment alongside the mention of the games?)

The quotes can say whatever you want. it's not about praising the engine or anything specific. e.g sharing your experience is valid, or just talking about your game. up to you!

Entries are in no particular order. Most projects include a web build and desktop builds.

capsule collector

by andie - play it here

zoom around, bust open capsules, and collect as many stars as you can

What andie had to say:

Coming from other engines, I was surprised at just how refreshing luxe is. It offers a ton of flexibility while also providing tools and structure if you need it. I was able to setup my gameplay loop for the jam very quickly, and iterating on it was similarly swift. Overall it was a great experience and I'm very excited to see where luxe goes in the future!

pineapple planter

by dolichomps - play it here

Grow some pineapples!

Quote:

I've been really blown away by how easy and quick it has been to learn luxe because everything is kept so ergonomic/nice on the code side of things.

Once I got going during the jam I found myself relying on the API docs much less than I expected because everything was so consistent and made sense. luxe has been a joy to work with and made getting from "i need to implement this" to "oh, it's done!" an absolute breeze.

Lighthouse Keeper

by joeld42 - play it here

You are the lighthouse keeper in this story puzzle game. Place land tiles, gather resources and try to maximize your score to bring balance to the landscape and achieve your goals.

Quote:

I've done a lot of game jams with a lot of engines, and using luxe was the fastest and most enjoyable way to be creative and try ideas out and just get things moving on the screen under the time constraints of a jam. I was wrestling with scope and features, but for once not fighting with the engine.

I mean it too... there were a few times when I went to add a feature (like the camera facing modifer, or the music, or stuff like that) where I was prepared for it to turn into a couple hours of debugging based on past experience and I was done in 5 minutes.

Stomp

by TheKing0x9 - play it here

Stomp is (should have been😅) a sharable platformer

Quote:

It was fun to move away from my comfort zone after a really long time, set some new challenges and finally achieve most of them. I am pretty impressed by how amazing the jam experience turned out to be, and how luxe stands perfect as to what a game engine should really be.

Sky Sky Panic: Re:Growth

by NickAVV - play it here

You are establishing a human settlement on a barren world. Thankfully the resources you need to grow lush plantlife are falling from the sky!

Quote:

I take game jams as an opportunity to learn new things and what's  better than learning a whole new engine? There were some rough edges to the experience but it's a beta and the developers were really responsive throughout the jam helping me get things working the way I wanted. Overall I feel like it was a great privilege to have early access to this promising engine!

Flappy Luxe

by Meta-link - play it here

Simple Flappy game, with an infinite level. Enjoy the game and try to beat your high score.

Quote:

Gamejams are a way to have fun creating games, and remake a game already known a good way to learn a new engine, its concepts and how it works. So I took this opportunity to make a flappy clone for the luxe jam and had a really good time creating this game while learning the engine alongside other luxe developers.

Bitra Major

by PROGRAM_IX - play it here

Control this flower with its two sets of rotating petals - one set destroys the incoming zeroes, one set destroys the ones.

Quote:

I have had much more experience with "here's a canvas, go to it" type frameworks as a game developer, so I started out doing a lot of messy low-level stuff that wasn't really necessary at all. luxe made me think about what an engine can do for me, instead of me writing the world's messiest vector rotation function or whatever.

Imagine not worrying about drawing every shape to screen each frame! By the end of the jam I had removed a ton of code that was reinventing the wheel in favour of using luxe features to the same effect, and it felt really good.

Frog Planter

by Jonathan Hirz - play it here

Walk around and dig a hole with space. That tile will then change from dug to watered to grown state, with a random plant.

Quote:

luxe is smartly designed and fun to use. Wren has a pretty easy learning curve and was easy to pick up. This combo gives me a lot of the tools needed to make whatever I want.

Good Job Piston-Bot

by 2DArray - play it here

Build a little gizmo which can travel to the right! With shareable contraptions via links.

Quote:

What a fun jam this turned out to be!  Really happy with how well luxe's web-export works, and I had a nice time with the drawing API.  Now send me your machinesssss

Friendship on the Golden Horizon

by btsherratt - play it here

Harvester has a problem. Can you help?

Quote:

I've wanted an excuse for a while to try a simple, pixel-art game and this was the perfect jam to try this out for. Luxe and Aseprite were perfect partners to bring this game to life, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've enjoyed playing the other submissions and I'm excited to see where the Luxe goes next!

gemerator

by Keymaster - play it here

A gem generator with custom math implementation and procedural geometry generation. Work in progress!

Quote:

Working in luxe is always a pleasure, and this time was no exception. I'd made a previous iteration of this prototype in a different engine, which made me appreciate how much more fluid and fun it is to use luxe. The engine gets out of your way to do what you want to do, while also offering lots of great tools to make your work easier - the drawing API is a personal favourite for quickly getting things on the screen.

Since I was doing some more adventurous stuff with procedural mesh generation I did run into some rough corners and missing features, but there was always a way to work around issues or fill gaps relatively easily.

MyC

by bloomingbridges - play it here

work in progress entry!

Honourable mention for Skye's submission, even though they had things come up it's nice that they learnt a bunch! Snowdrama (itch) is also still working on their entry, which we'll add above when it's done.

Conclusions

I'm glad people had fun during the jam!
You can view the work in progress tweets at #createwithluxe.

If you have a minute, I'm sure people would appreciate a comment on their itch game page for the entry if you have feedback!

We found and fixed a couple of key bugs, got a good amount of feedback which will improve things immediately, and it's clear that people are able to make stuff with the engine as it stands - even if it's not done and not perfect it's usable + nice to use. That was the goal of the preview phase.

That's exciting news, if you're excited for the open beta.
We'll have more news about that soon enough.

Note that there'll be more relaxed jams especially as we enter open beta. So don't worry about missing out!

Till next time

• Join the official discord
• Follow luxe on twitter
• Follow ruby on twitter
• Follow ronja on twitter
• Follow studio any percent on twitter
• Read about access and details of the luxe closed beta

Sign up on the newsletter if you haven't!