Why did I make this?

This tiny game was made in one week for the Brackeys Game Jam 2025.2.

A jam is a friendly competition between game developers who are tasked to create a complete game, based on a set theme, and in a very short period of time.
Participants usually grade the other games to create rankings.

After a thrilling experience with the GMTK 25, I decided to take part in another jam, also hosted by a famous YouTuber: Brackeys.

The theme was very broad: risk it for the biscuit.

And oh boy, what an emotional roller coaster!
I nearly gave everything up.

Before the jam

I hesitated a bit to take part because I had more work than expected, and my last jam’s team wasn’t available.
2 days before starting, I manage to find teammates on the jam Discord server: PeaceWithTrees and CloudBerryBunny.

The idea was to make a small team with the core skills of game dev: coding, art, and sound.

First and second days

I was busy the first days, so I knew I would not start coding until the third one.
But it shouldn’t have been a problem since we had 7 days to make the game.

We took this time to think about ideas, set up tools, and share our availability.

I personally followed the branching strategy advice of this video from Jonas Tyroller.
And it worked quite well!

We settled on this annoying GDPR-like cookies pop-ups idea, and I tried scoping it down by focusing on core gameplay.

The idea we chose was a very creative one, and I was delighted to work with English-speaking people, so I was pumped to start working on it for real.

Third day

I started by following this complete user interface tutorial because I wanted to prevent all the struggle we had during the previous jam with UI in Godot, the game engine I’m using to make games.
Moreover, this game would be all about UI: windows, websites, and buttons.

I was really stressed that day because I had a lot of chores to do (due to not having been home for the previous days), and I started to think that our idea was over-scoped for our one-dev-only team.

It took a lot of time to create the browser-like, switchable-tabs system (and I could have avoided that, because in practice, no one switches tabs!).
I planned to have a working prototype for the next evening.

To keep my sanity, I decided to not work this night and played with friends instead. It made me feel better.

Fourth day

I made tangible progress!

I created dummy websites from Wikipedia articles and came up with silly titles for them.
The timer per website and the scoring system by clicking on buttons were also built.

But I struggled with many hard-to-fix bugs and code architecture choices.
Also, some work calls cut my flow several times in the day.

Moreover, I started having a bad feeling:

• I wasn’t sure the gameplay was fun.
• The artist made some quick art, but it was very gray; there was no appeal.
• Radio silence on my teammates side, while I was posting screenshots of every improvement.

The over-scoped feeling was a reality now: I missed my deadline for a playable prototype, and there was too much complex code to make everything work together.
But I wasn’t sure how I could have made a smaller prototype without all the bricks, which were essential to the core gameplay loop.

On the positive side, though, I improved my Godot and code architecture skills that day.

Fifth day

That day, I wasn’t able to work on the game until the evening.
So I knew I would need to work at night too to finish the game in the remaining two days.

I managed to fix a performance issue with websites loading (because there’s so much text in them) and added the remaining cookies popup system (which was our core idea!) to finally have a playable prototype.

After trying it, all my fears came true: the game was not fun.

I didn’t know what to do.

I wanted to give up.
It felt like a big, hard-work-wasting failure.

That was when I was this down that the composer came back from the dead:

1. He made music and sound effects and wanted to put them in the game;
2. He thought the game wasn’t boring and gave ideas to improve it.

We settled on:

• making 3 levels with increasing difficulty;
• increasing variety in websites;
• and making the cookie pop-up scroll you to inline ads.

I was clearly reboosted and directly went to work several hours to implement these.

Sixth day

At last, I was able to host playtests in the evening, after creating the level system and fixing a lot of annoying bugs.
This day I also had to juggle with external work tasks.

Playtests results were bad: all 3 players were bored.
But they also gave interesting ideas to salvage what could be of this game.

I was able to merge the code of the composer, which somehow managed to get the hold of Godot and version control…that was unexpected, but it really helped!

I went to bed late but happy: a first version was published on itch.io, and the game would be like it would be; that’s the spirit of game jams after all.

Last day

I started the last day with a deep analysis of playtests feedback with AI to identify quick wins that will improve the game within the few hours left.

The day went much better than the previous ones, in part due to not having external work to do.
I had fun quickly designing a nostalgic Windows XP-inspired art style. Then I added randomness and those annoying ad pop-ups.

Finally, I was happy with this clunky but unique game.
Playtesters were liking it more.

This project made a spectacular recovery!

I finished for the second time in a row at 1AM by creating the itch.io page and making small fixes.

I went to bed EXHAUSTED, my arms completely stiff.

Ratings

There was a 2-week period to rate games.

I played 13 of them and found very good ideas and polished games but was also disappointed to see that the very broad theme permitted almost any type of game to be made.

The creative constraint that the theme should have created wasn’t very strong.

With 23 ratings, we made it to #71st place in Innovation, which is a great score on more than 2299 games!

Then, I played the top 3 of each category, and as often, my games were in the Gameplay, Innovation, and Theme criteria.
And this time, a lot of winners were teams of 2-3 (it seems there’s a sweet spot here!).

Key takeaways

I learned a lot through this project:

• Settle on a simple gameplay loop to be able to make a playable prototype quickly, especially if it’s a one-dev-only team.
• Choose your teammates wisely: async work and part-time availability are okay, but frequent communication is crucial.
• Adding sounds and music can drastically change the feeling of a game.
• In a game jam, even an at-first not-fun game can be salvaged into something people like.

And now?

I was happy with the outcome of this experience, but it was also very stressful for me.

Even if people who rated our game seem to like its gameplay, I don’t want to go back to it.
The main idea wasn’t good enough, and I don’t see ways to make a bigger project from it.

I will jam again, though :)