Deep Dive
In Squeaky Clean, you control Octave the Octopus, and are tasked to fulfill electrical appliances’ needs, such as cleaning and rinsing them, grating a disco ball to produce glitter, giving them cats popping out from a vending machine, or drawing out a pentagram using (game) jam!
You have five minutes to accomplish as many tasks as possible, while slippery physics and angry duckies try to mess your movements!
This game was made in under 48 hours for the Global Game Jam 2025, specifically the ArtFX version of the GGJ, including more custom “Diversifiers” to add in each game.
Bubbling Over It
As with all Game Jam games, this one had a theme; being “Bubbles”. Thought bubbles, financial bubbles, cavitation… We had a lot of different ideas but instead of going too far off-track, we decided to stay within the base “Soap Bubble” meaning.
The end of our team brainstorm was a duel between two ideas:
> One was a 2D-platformer where you play as an octopus trying to escape the inside of a washing machine.
> The other was “Nintendogs, but where you clean washing machines instead“.
Deciding that the latter would probably be easier to make in a Game Jam; we polished the idea with more frantic slippery movements and a timer to keep the design focused.
Final look of the game, with crazy slippery physics and reflective graphics
On the art side, our team decided the direction to take: Pastel colors, low-poly “cute” modeling, lots of reflection/roughness and round toy shapes everywhere.
They created a single “Color Pallet” texture with every available color including gradients and placed it on each model using UVs; a workflow developed to prevent having to do texturing for every item while still allowing for a coherent and precise artstyle.
Diversifiers, Design & Ducks
As with every ArtFX edition of the Global Game Jam, we were given a set of bonus diversifiers, as “Easter eggs” to place in our games.
The highlights for this edition (and for our game!) were:
> “Put a cat that sounds like a door” – So we added a vending machine that pops out cats. Obviously, those cats make door creak sounds when you pick them up.
> “Put yellow rubber ducks” – I didn’t notice the “Yellow” until somebody pointed it out so I already randomized the color. Thankfully, I hard-coded one mini-duck to be yellow all the time.
> “Add a Disco Ball” – But instead of just placing it, we decided to grate the disco ball using a cheese grater to create glitter.
What happened after discovering the vending machine spawned cats without limits.
Since the electrical appliances fall from above, you easily could get pushed through the floor. Instead of fixing the bug, we developed it into a feature! If you fall downwards, you land into a dark room with extra-aggressive red-eyed ducks. The Demon Room as we call it.
The Demon Room. Beware the Demon Duckies!