| Project | Clam I Am |
|---|---|
| Studio | Mattorigus Studios |
| Role | Concept Creator & Minigame Designer |
| Disciplines | Game Design, Concept Development, Minigame Design, Pixel Art |
| Visual Style | Pixel Art |
| Scope | 15 levels, 7 standard minigames, 2 boss encounters |
| Competition | GMC Jam 60 |
| Status | Alpha submission, awaiting votes, planned full release |
Clam I Am is a chaotic, comedy-driven arcade game developed for GMC Jam 60. Players take control of Pachinko, an otter with an insatiable appetite for clams and a growing frustration with the traditional method of smashing rocks together to get at them.
Fortunately, Pachinko has discovered a much better solution: a pachinko board.
Drop clams through a maze of pegs, build up a fortune, upgrade your board and collect increasingly ridiculous hats. Then put your earnings on the line in a series of bizarre minigames, where victory means keeping your money and potentially earning a new hat. Lose, and you’ll be sent back to the board with your winnings gone and an unfortunate peg upgrade to show for it.
Featuring 15 levels, seven minigames, two boss encounters, pixel art and enough clam-related wordplay to make even the most seasoned crustacean groan, Clam I Am is a game built around one simple philosophy: why settle for ordinary clam smashing when you could make it an entire career?
The game is currently being developed as an alpha for GMC Jam 60, with the intention of using the jam build as a foundation for a more complete release.
My contribution focuses on the game’s concept, minigame design and minigame artwork, helping create a varied collection of challenges that give the game its personality.
The Concept
An otter. A pachinko board. An unreasonable number of clams.
The central idea behind Clam I Am was to take the familiar appeal of arcade-style pachinko and give it a ridiculous narrative context.
Pachinko is an otter who loves clams, but has grown tired of the tedious process of bashing rocks together to get at them. Instead of accepting this as a fact of otter life, Pachinko decides to revolutionise clam extraction through the power of arcade gaming.
The result is a progression-driven pachinko adventure where players drop clams through pegs to earn money, invest in upgrades and take increasingly ridiculous risks.
The humour is deliberately silly, with the game’s identity built around wordplay, exaggerated situations and a protagonist whose ambitions far exceed the humble task of obtaining lunch.
I wanted the minigames to feel like an extension of this world, taking familiar activities and turning them into absurd clam-themed interpretations.
My Role
Concept Creator & Minigame Designer
I contributed to the creative development of Clam I Am, focusing on the game’s overall concept, minigame design and associated artwork.
My responsibilities included:
- Developing the central game concept and its comedic identity.
- Designing the individual minigames and their gameplay challenges.
- Creating minigame artwork and visual assets.
- Exploring ways to make each minigame feel mechanically distinct.
- Ensuring the minigames complemented the main pachinko progression system.
- Developing the visual presentation of the minigame concepts within the wider pixel art style.
The central challenge was variety. Each minigame needed to offer a different type of interaction, keeping the experience fresh while remaining part of the same absurd universe.
The Main Game: Pachinko
At the centre of Clam I Am is the main pachinko board.
Players drop clams through a field of pegs, watching them bounce through the board and land in scoring areas. The resulting rewards provide money that can be reinvested into the game.
This creates a simple but satisfying progression loop:
- Drop clams through the pachinko board.
- Earn money based on where they land.
- Spend earnings on peg upgrades and cosmetic hats.
- Enter a minigame and put your accumulated winnings on the line.
- Win to keep your money and potentially earn a hat, or lose everything and receive a bad peg.
- Continue progressing through the levels.
The system is built around risk and reward. Players are encouraged to build up their earnings and improve their board, but each minigame presents an opportunity to lose the money they’ve accumulated.
This gives the minigames a meaningful role within the wider progression system. They’re not simply optional distractions, but important moments where players have to decide whether their accumulated fortune is worth risking.
Pegs & Progression
Money earned through the pachinko board can be used to upgrade pegs, improving the player’s ability to earn more money in subsequent rounds.
Players can also collect hats, providing a cosmetic reward that adds personality to Pachinko.
However, failure has consequences. Losing a minigame means losing the money earned during the previous round and receiving a bad peg.
This creates an entertaining cycle of investment, risk and recovery, with players constantly trying to build towards bigger rewards.
Minigame Design
The minigames are where Clam I Am really gets to embrace its personality.
I worked on designing the individual minigames, with the goal of creating a collection of short, varied challenges that could be understood quickly but still provide entertaining gameplay moments.
Rather than repeating the same mechanic with different visual themes, each minigame explores a different interaction style, ranging from precision and timing to typing, rhythm, performance and comedy.
There are seven standard minigames and two additional boss encounters.
CALM
Stop the clam from sneezing.
A precision and timing challenge where players must prevent a clam from unleashing an enormous sneeze.
The premise takes an everyday bodily function and turns it into an absurdly important arcade challenge.
Proclammer
Type the exact amount of keystrokes to create your clam-smashing algorithm.
A typing-based challenge built around precision. Players must enter exactly the required number of keystrokes to complete their clam-smashing algorithm.
It’s a deliberately ridiculous interpretation of programming, where getting the number wrong could be the difference between a successful algorithm and a very unhappy clam.
Clamour Model
The clam wants to strike a pose. Help them on the catwalk!
A fashion and performance-themed minigame where players help a clam become a runway sensation.
It’s an opportunity to lean into the game’s character and cosmetic humour, giving the clam world a surprisingly glamorous side.
Small Clams Court
The clam is suing you. Object to its lies!
A courtroom-inspired challenge where players must object to the clam’s increasingly questionable allegations.
The premise turns a legal dispute into an interactive comedy scenario, giving players a chance to defend themselves against a particularly litigious mollusc.
Clam Poetry
Help Pachinko stick it to the clam, man.
A creative wordplay challenge where players help Pachinko deliver some clam-themed poetry.
The minigame embraces the game’s love of terrible puns and gives its protagonist another opportunity to express his feelings about the clam community.
Terms and Clamditions
Make sure you agree!
A challenge built around the universally thrilling experience of agreeing to terms and conditions.
The joke is in treating something most players would normally ignore as an important gameplay event.
Rivar Hero
Clap to open the clam.
A rhythm and timing challenge where players must clap in order to open a clam.
It brings a different kind of interaction into the minigame collection, using rhythm as the basis for a simple and memorable challenge.
Boss Encounters
Beyond the standard minigames, Clam I Am features two larger encounters that provide milestones within the game’s progression.
These boss levels take the game’s ridiculous premise and turn it up another notch.
Steamed Clams
Create an incredible luncheon.
A culinary-themed boss encounter where players must prepare an impressive meal.
The challenge embraces the game’s food-related humour and gives Pachinko the opportunity to demonstrate that his interest in clams extends well beyond simply collecting them.
WWC Grand Clam
Smack down that clam!
The ultimate clam showdown.
The WWC Grand Clam encounter provides a more dramatic confrontation, bringing players face to face with a particularly formidable clam.
It’s the kind of over-the-top finale that feels perfectly suited to a game about an otter who decided that clam acquisition needed its own arcade economy.
Visual Direction & Pixel Art
Clam I Am uses pixel art to give the game a colourful, approachable arcade aesthetic.
The visual style supports the game’s comedic tone, allowing its characters, environments and minigames to communicate their ideas quickly.
My contribution focused specifically on the artwork for the minigames, helping establish the visual identity of each individual challenge.
One of the interesting aspects of this work was ensuring that each minigame could communicate its premise visually, even when its mechanics were completely different from the others.
A courtroom, a fashion runway, a poetry challenge and a rhythm game all require different visual cues. The artwork needed to make these scenarios immediately recognisable while retaining the shared personality of Clam I Am.
The pixel art approach also complements the arcade structure, reinforcing the game’s playful relationship with classic gaming conventions.
Progression, Risk & Replayability
A key design element of Clam I Am is the relationship between the main pachinko board and its minigames.
The pachinko board provides the consistent gameplay foundation, while the minigames introduce variety and risk.
This structure creates an interesting balance between predictable progression and unpredictable outcomes.
Players can spend time building their earnings and improving their board, but every minigame presents the possibility of losing that progress.
The reward structure encourages players to keep pushing for better results, with hats providing additional incentives beyond simply accumulating money.
Across 15 levels, players encounter an evolving series of challenges, with the two boss encounters providing larger milestones within the experience.
The online leaderboards give players another reason to keep playing, providing a competitive goal beyond completing the main game.
The ultimate ambition is simple: get Pachinko’s name in lights.
GMC Jam 60
Clam I Am is being developed for GMC Jam 60, with the jam providing an opportunity to test the concept, gameplay systems and creative direction.
Game jams are particularly useful for exploring unusual ideas without committing to the production scope of a larger commercial project.
For Clam I Am, the challenge was to build a cohesive game around a central pachinko mechanic while introducing enough variation to sustain player interest.
The minigames were an important part of this process, allowing us to experiment with different gameplay styles and comedic scenarios within a shared progression system.
The current version is being treated as an alpha rather than the final product. Once the game jam submission is complete and feedback has been gathered, the intention is to use the experience as a foundation for a more complete release.
At the time of writing, the game is awaiting GMC Jam 60 voting.
Project Outcome & Future Development
The GMC Jam 60 build represents the first playable version of Clam I Am and an opportunity to validate its central gameplay loop.
The project brings together pachinko-style arcade gameplay, upgrade progression, cosmetic collection, a collection of distinct minigames and boss encounters.
My contribution to the concept, minigame design and artwork helped establish much of the game’s personality and variety.
The next stage is to evaluate the alpha, gather player feedback and identify opportunities to expand and refine the experience.
The longer-term ambition is to develop Clam I Am into a more complete release, building on the initial game jam version.
Potential areas for further development include expanding the minigame collection, refining the progression and economy systems, introducing additional levels and rewards, and further developing Pachinko’s world and personality.
Reflection
Clam I Am has been an opportunity to explore a very different kind of game design from my more narrative-driven projects.
Where some of my work focuses on atmosphere, emotional storytelling and carefully structured experiences, Clam I Am is built around immediate humour, mechanical variety and arcade-style progression.
The most interesting challenge was designing minigames that felt genuinely different while still belonging to the same game. Each needed its own identity and interaction style, but they also had to fit naturally into the wider pachinko economy.
I particularly enjoyed exploring how familiar concepts could be reinterpreted through the game’s central clam-related premise. Turning courtroom drama, fashion shows, poetry and programming into clam-themed arcade challenges gave the project plenty of room for experimentation.
The risk-and-reward structure also provides an interesting foundation, making the minigames meaningful parts of the progression rather than simply standalone diversions.
As a game jam project, Clam I Am is an opportunity to test an unusual concept, experiment with different gameplay styles and establish the foundations for something larger.
Sometimes the best game ideas start with a simple question: what if an otter really, really wanted some clams?
