Two weeks ago, from Friday, July the 15th to Sunday, July the 17th was held the 2022 edition of the GMTK Jam. More than 22.000 people challenged it, with over 6165 games created for the occasion. At onepoint, a team of experts and I decided to tackle the experience and create our own game ! Here is how it went.

Play our game on itch.io!

What is the GMTK Jam ?

The GMTK Jam is a game jam organised by Mark Brown, the creator of the GMTK Youtube channel, a channel dedicated to game design and game development tips. Each summer (almost…) he organizes one of the most important game jams ever. This edition actually assembled 22.000 people, with more than 6000 games created.

During a game jam, people, solo or with a team, have to develop a game from scratch in a given time frame. For this GMTK 2022, we had 48 hours to create a game from scratch.

What is our game ?

With a team composed of four developers, one designer and one game designer, we decided to create a narrative game, in which the player would have to escort Alice, a geeky girl who snuck out of her home to go and buy the last limited edition of “Captain OP”, her favorite hero, and has to come back before her mother gets angry. To gain some time, she choses to cut through the forest…but a horde of enemies blocks her path! She then has to use her fellow dices, to solve the problems.

We chose to give our game a very ‘comic’ aesthetic, with sharp frames and a beautiful style. The game is all nice, as the player has to explore and get more dices, which will allow them to solve the mathematical problems in front of them. The game in itself is a succession of little maps with those problems, and the player has to select the proper dices to play to optimize its chances to win.

How did we do ?

Personally, I enjoyed the experience. I have been doing game jams for almost five years now, and I never ever felt so good in doing one. We were all perfectly in sync, the team was working well, the final game looks awesome. I learned a lot and had a blast!

Play our game on itch.io!

As for the reviews, they were mostly very positives. The game was very well received, mostly for its aesthetics, and we had a lot of very good feedbacks, which allowed us to release a second version, bug free, of the game just after the jam finished. We ranked up 158th over 6165, which is a top 3% of games! We are very proud of how it turned out, and we hope to do it again next year!