Birb Games's entry into the 2025 Game Maker's Toolkit Game Jam: "Kessler Syndrome"

Last year, my friends (gldeA and cfinn) and I made The Server Must Scale for the 2024 GMTK game jam. Once again, we decided to participate in the GMTK game jam for 2025!

The theme for this year was “Loop” and we had a number of different ideas. We ultimately interpreted the idea of a “loop” as an orbit - an object in space circling around another object. If you think about it, orbits are just large loops in space.

My friend gldeA and I worked on the project together over the course of four days. The game started out quite differently from the final product: we initially started work on a game where the player controlled a planet that was orbiting around a star and you had to control the planet to keep its orbit as stable for as long as possible. A rogue planet was entering the solar system and would disrupt the orbits of the planets and that would lead to planets and asteroids being thrown from their orbits and turning into potential hazards for the player to avoid. The player had a laser cannon and rocket boosters to move around. The main issue with the game in my opinion was that the movement was not very good and ultimately I didn’t think it was a particlarly fun game.

We then decided to pivot and change the concept of the game while hopefully still being able to reuse a lot of the code and artwork already made. We decided to make change the game to be about a satellite shooting at other satellites while in orbit around a planet. It took some work to change the code and rework the project but I think it paid off in the end.

The backstory behind the game is that there is a rogue planet heading towards the solar system and that planet has a hostile alien civilization that is launching attack probes into the solar system so the player has to control their own satellite to destroy them. There are 9 levels and 8 of them are modeled after the 8 planets in the solar system (sorry Pluto) with the potential exception of level 3 which is The Sun but I put an object orbiting the sun to represent Mercury.

My friend gldeA composed the music (and we worked together on programming) for the game and I personally really like it so I would like to thank him so much for putting the time in to compose the soundtrack.

The game is called Kessler Syndrome (wikipedia) and the reason why we picked that name was because Kessler Syndrome is a potential disaster in which too many satellites are in orbit and one of the satellites is destroyed and this causes a chain reaction in which the debris destroys/damages more satellites. This continues until most or all satellites are destroyed and so much debris is in orbit that it becomes impossible to send any more satellites or missions into space. Considering the game is about destroying satellites in orbit around various planets, naming the game after such a scenario seems appropriate. Also “Kessler Syndrome” just sounds like a cool name.

You can play Kessler Syndrome on itch.io.

Anyway, that’s it, have a nice day!