Game Jam
Game
Date
Duration
Team Size
Game Designer, Gameplay Programmer
Goblin Smasher is a small academic project I created for the Playable Media course at the IT University of Copenhagen. I built it during Nordic Game Jam 2025 and used the project as a way to explore critical game design. The goal was not just to make a tiny action game, but to question one of the most common assumptions in games: that violence introduced by a tutorial is automatically accepted as the correct thing to do.
The setup is intentionally familiar. The player is guided through a standard-looking tutorial, learns movement, and is eventually told to attack. The important twist is that this instruction is optional. If the player follows it, they trigger a chain of combat and destruction. If they resist it, the game can be completed in a much more pacifist way. That simple change allowed me critique how strongly tutorials shape player behavior.
This project came out of my interest in the more unconventional side of game design. In the Playable Media course, I wanted to make something that still used my programming background but was more focused on asking a question rather than building a larger system. Goblin Smasher became that experiment. It let me make a compact playable piece and then reflect on how game structure, player expectation, and moral framing interact.
I developed the project during Nordic Game Jam 2025 because I wanted to try my first solo jam, and it felt like the perfect opportunity. I did not build it around the official jam theme or submit it to the jam's itch.io page. Instead, I used the event as a space to work on my own small project while sitting with other developers, talking about games, and enjoying the creative exchange.
The main academic and practical goals of the project were:
What interested me most was the tutorial itself. In many games, tutorials feel neutral, but they are actually very strong framing tools. They tell the player not only how to interact, but also what kind of behavior the game considers normal. In Goblin Smasher, I used that structure directly. The game asks the player to attack, but attacking is not required. Following that instruction is what pushes the game into violence.
I liked this approach because it does not rely on a long speech or a complicated branching story. The critique comes from the player's own habit of trusting the tutorial. If they obey it, they become complicit in what follows. That made the project a good fit for a short academic game, because the core idea stays legible even in a very small scope.
Goblin Smasher is a good example of how I like to approach academic work in games: not as something separate from making games, but as a way to think more precisely about why a design decision matters. Even though the project is small, it combines implementation, conceptual framing, and reflection in a way I found very rewarding. It also reminded me that a project does not need a lot of scope to say something meaningful if the core interaction is chosen carefully.