Game Dev

GMTK 2024 Game Jam Retrospective

Nate Hitze

01 Sep 2024 • 4 min read

Game promo image

It's hard to believe I've been doing this game jam for 5 years now. Game Maker's Toolkit does a yearly game jam where tens of thousands of people spend a weekend building a game around a theme. That theme this year was Built to Scale. In past years the time limit was 48 hours but this year that was doubled to 96 hours. For this retrospective I want to reflect on some of the other things that were different about this jam for me.

Teamwork

The first big difference this year was having a teammate. I recruited my favorite sister, TM, to serve as game designer and art director. Having a teammate was really a game changer. TM was able to design the game, iron out details, and find art, all in parallel to what I was working on. We collaborated on design using Google Docs and Sheets which allowed me to keep working when she was gone and vice versa. Having a solid plan helped significantly with the development work. It was nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of and to help make decisions.

TM also did a great job picking out art assets (including music, UI, and the game pieces) that fit the idea of the game in her head. Since we were splitting the work, she had time to really invest into looking at the art and finding what's best. One shining example is her designing the look of buildings in Google Sheets using the individual art pieces we had. When I do it on my own I'm usually just looking for whatever I can do quickly and making up design as I go.

Having a team, even just one other person, was probably the biggest lesson I will take away from this. The help was invaluable for both my sanity and the game itself.

Additional Time

Having an extra 48 hours sounds like a good thing but it ended up putting me in a weird place. 96 hours is a long time to stay committed to and focused on a single project. Towards the end I was running out of steam. With the 48 hour limit I felt like my goal for almost everything I did was to get it done as fast as possible. The 96 hour limit gave me more room to take things on at a slower pace, but I never felt like the end product was going to be twice as good.

Ideas

This section isn't unique to this game jam, or even game jams, or even projects in general. Throughout the project we're bombarded by ideas – from ourselves, from people watching the development, and from people who talked about it. It is difficult to sift through what ideas are worth implementing and which ones aren't. Once our game started to take shape the ideas only increased in volume. We had more quest ideas, more content that could be added, better interactions, fancier animations, and so on.

It's really hard to design a game. Even with a fairly clear vision of what we wanted to build, we struggled with how to complete the idea. We waffled on a few important things like: "how do you win?" "what's the point of the game?" "how does it end?". They are hard decisions to make because of the constraints in place. It had to be something I could program quickly, it had to fit the theme, and it had to fit the art we had available. Next time I would like to spend more time figuring this out before starting development.

Game Engine

This year I used Godot instead of Unity. I had built a couple of projects in Godot within the last year so I felt pretty well equipped to build a quick simple 2D game in it. I've loved working with Godot because the Node+Scene system is exactly how I think about building games. My one criticism of Godot might just be due to my lack of experience. I spent forever trying to get UI elements in the right place with the right size.

Closing Thoughts

Going into this jam I thought this would just be a "rinse and repeat" event. I thought I would just do what I did last year, piecing together public domain art with some code into a finished project that resembled a game. I could not have been more wrong. This was a unique and fun experience, and I look forward to doing it again next year.

In the end, out of 7,629 game entries to the jam we placed #492 overall. You can check out the jam submission here and play the game here.