First Game Jam Trial by Fire - Fox

GMTK 2021 Game Jam

We had just come off of launching Rem Paralysis, our trial 2D roguelike that we created to test our current skills, and were utterly exhausted.

Even though Rem Paralysis was developed part time the last week or so was extremely busy, trying to make it playable to some extent. Once Pale had finished setting up the page, I ended up perusing Itch.io absent-mindedly and found the GMTK's 2021 Game Jam.

I was aware of the annual Game Jam and loved watching the games people game up with in 48hrs. Top 20 always amazed me with the amount of originality that devs came up with for the prompt as well as the amount of work they most of done to get to that point of polish. As a person who always tries to plan to mitigate crunch, game jams terrified me.

Game jams intrigued me but I never felt confident or skilled enough as a designer to even attempt to join one so I never did

Until spite entered the chat.

The night we were relaxing right after launching Rem we decided to just chill in voice chat and I ended mentioned the GMTK's Game Jam to one of our mates who is also a game designer. While he didn't seem all that interested in participating he said that if we joined, he would too as an opposing party.

So we joined and completely forgot about it until the day it started.

Magnetum

Joined Together. What on earth could we make.

Due to our timezone(AEST) the game jam started at 4am and I ended up waking at 9:30am so time was very much of the essence. Time was not too be wasted! Pale had a couple of half ideas but nothing he was committed too. However, after musing on the topic for a while I knew I wanted a game about magnets. Pitching an idea to Pale in a tired state was difficult so a list was made.

• A glass box.

• 2 magnets, one of the inside, one on the outside that controls the inside magnet.

• A breakable

• A slime block

• A pull tab

• And a simple maze

Man got a prototype done within the next 2 hours:

To cut a long story short we created a puzzle box like game where you had to guide the red half of the magnet out of the box to weld with the blue half, hence, joined together!

We fell in love with making the environments for each level. I took charged of the whole of Level 1 whilst Pale designed Level 2 and I just detailed it. It was decided early on that we had to keep a low scope. 2 levels, polished really well and we don't regret it.

Results

There were some obvious problems with how it controlled and how mechanics were communicated but we're committed on making a fully polished demo for a better overall experience. Plans for a full demo are in the works as despite only working 20 hours on it we've fallen in love with the concept.

For our first game jam we were just happened that a relative large amount of people enjoyed our small game. It gave us the feeling of warm pride. Magnetum ended up in the Top 200 which is amazing considering there were almost 6000 entries. We're grateful for all the positive and constructive criticism given during the jam. Confidence was given and now we hope to create more and hopefully enter more game jams