Josiah Flachman

I’ve been participating in the GMTK Game Jam for 4 years now; this year I decide to put together a postmortem summarizing what I’ve learned.

But first, What is a Game Jam? It’s a community oriented competition to create a video game from scratch in a limited time period based on a theme that’s revealed at the beginning of the jam. In the case of this Year’s GMTK Jam, the theme was “Count Down” & we had 96 hours before submissions closed.

This year I chose to participate solo, meaning that I needed to create all the art, music, graphic design, game/interaction design, & programming for the game.

So, what did I learn?

• I’ve grown & improved since beginning to learn game development 3.5 years ago, thankfully. This jam was one of the most successful to date with the best ranking & sentiment of my projects.
• Small & weird beats big & formulaic, the games I loved the most from this year were often only one screen and a single button. There’s no need to create a complete game loop to create a compelling experience, in fact focusing on game loop might be a disadvantage.
• Focus on interaction & mechanics first, art last. Especially on solo projects, starting with polish can prevent you from discovering new solutions.
• Bold colors & striking art styles drive engagement & interest. If you’re looking to drive interest in a game jam, capsules with a striking color palette like duo-tone blood red on black tend to drive more interest.
• Custom Itch.io Pages Drive Engagement; the most rated games in the jam had highly designed custom landing pages that drove strong interest and first impressions.