MANUEL MANUEL You are not your average dentist. You are a mouse dentist, and your patient’s tooth just became your entire world. Built in 24 hours for a game jam on the theme “deeper and deeper”, the run drills down through four layers of the tooth: enamel, dentin, pulp and root.
Debris and nerves block the way. Clearing the right ones raises the score, but every meter deeper pushes up the pain bar on the right side of the screen, and each new layer makes it climb faster. Anesthesia syringes scattered through the level buy that pain back, saved for whenever the player decides to use them. The level is short and finite on purpose: it is built to be replayed for a better score, rewarding both speed and a clean sweep.
I worked as gameplay programmer and technical artist. I wrote the drilling and movement mechanics, the random spawning of obstacles and pickups along the descent, and the integration of the VFX that sell every impact.
The tooth had to feel like one continuous, endless descent inside a jam-sized scope. I solved it with a single shader-generated tile that repeats as the player drills down and remaps its color from the world position on Y, so enamel bleeds into dentin and pulp without a single new asset or scene load. The result reads as a hand-painted gradient hundreds of meters deep, while the engine only ever draws the same square.
