Hop Don't
Drop!

Hop Don't Drop! is a 3D platformer built over 36 hours at The Copper Pixel university game jam. Three of us on the team, theme: Alice in Wonderland. We won first place.

We leaned into the rabbit down the hole angle specifically — that sense of falling into a world that runs on its own logic, where scale is elastic and nothing needs to be grounded. That gave us permission to use an ethereal colour palette, and it made the floating islands thematically coherent without justification. Players race through levels, collecting coins for time bonuses. The mechanic is simple on purpose.

I think we placed because we disciplined our scope from the start. We set a ceiling on what the game would be and didn't move it, which meant we had time to actually finish things. The assets are properly built, the level reads cleanly, the edges are caught. For a jam format where player-judges are comparing multiple entries back-to-back, a game that feels complete carries more weight than one with bigger ambitions and loose ends. The low-poly style was a conscious part of that: it's technically forgiving, but it also produces something visually striking: vibrant, readable, and easy to parse at a glance.

What I'm proudest of isn't any specific system. It's that the team delegated cleanly, worked in our lanes without collision, and crossed the finish line with something that looked like we'd had more than 36 hours. For a jam, that's the hardest thing to pull off.