1 month later...

Hello all! I wanted to come back to the game and share my personal experiences working on it. It was really a fun time working through this game and leading the project with my friends, but we managed to get it done so here's how we did it. Two days before the game jam started (at roughly 10:00 PM,) I was scrolling through my phone when I saw the "Little Slime Blows Up" GMTK retrospective on Youtube. I had seen this video before and always considered entering out of interest but never had enough motive or skill to do so. Since I was now in high school looking down the barrel of college, I thought now would be a good time to try before school got too busy in September.

I called up two friends (in the same grade as me who you know as Jinny_R and RyGuyVidsYT,) and convinced them to join the game jam. The only problem was that we didn’t know any game engine's languages due to the fact that we were simply not professionals. I spent the last two days before the game jam learning Godot (I didn't need to learn too much on how to code scripts or make games in general due to me having prior and more casual experience,) and its language GDscript.

On the first day the competition was announced as you all know, and we had to begin work. I immediately started coming up with ideas, all of the ideas we had were listed in this google doc: GMTK Ideas 2025 but I eventually landed the idea of a book telling you what was about to happen, and you had to learn from your past deaths to beat the game. The main inspiration for this idea was Doors from Roblox inspiring the entities and events in the game, as we had been playing Pressure (also from Roblox and inspired from Doors,) a lot before the start of the competition, and I noticed the gameplay loop that kept us hooked for multiple days until we finally beat the game for the first time together was actually very fitting for the theme that year, so I decided to repurpose the idea of learning from your past runs as well as random entities to get farther to create our game. In other words, Guy (the protagonist of our story,) was stuck in a basic gameplay loop. We came up with a few event/entity ideas here: Event Ideas and the work began. 

Jinny was tasked with making the base controls such as platforming, RyGuy was given the task of making the main menu, and I gave myself the task of making the text boxes for the books. It was a very long and arduous process, but Jinny finished making the foundation of the platforming sometime in the afternoon of the first day and I finished the foundation of the text boxes after working on it without breaks from the start of coding it to the end sometime around 11:00 PM.

On the second day from basically the moment we woke up to when we went to sleep, all of us worked as long as we possibly could. An unfortunate evil due to the sheer amount of stuff we tried to put into the game with so few people and time. 

On the third day I was working on the Shadowman and birds while Jinny was working on the water, lava, and obsidian system. We both went for a really long time, until 11:00 PM again when our parents told us to go to sleep.

On the fourth day, we still weren’t done with all of the mechanics, mainly the book which still didn’t have all of the randomly generated text. The day was dedicated to adding in the art , music, book system, and general fixes before the last day.

On the fifth day, we were still barely prepared, I tried to fix the game and managed to do so to a certain extent, but I had to submit at the final few minutes. We had assumed (this was the biggest problem that day,) that we could just turn the Godot file into an executable and submit it with the page without problems, but this did not go to plan. I slapped together the page with a download instead of a browser game to make sure we had something leading to the current page displayed when trying to play the game. I was not allowed to re-edit this page. (Keep in mind this was before a 1 hour extension the hosts gave due to Itch.io being broken.) We were able to make an executable after the game jam games had been submitted, but it had to be on a completely separate site or we would have risked being disqualified. (If you are interested, here is our fixed version made after the submissions completely closed: Waiting For Chaos (Browser Edition))

In the end we were able to submit the final version of our game, but admittedly, even with the days of work we put in, it did not meet my hopes and dreams. I do hope I can learn from this and create a better game next year if I get the chance.

After a week Game Maker’s Toolkit revealed our final score. Surprisingly, despite our plan on enjoyment, art, and music as our main selling points, Narrative of all things was the most highly ranked, getting 1902nd place. Audio and Artwork got 3345th place and 3466th place respectively, with audio being expected due to the lack of smoothness in SFX and music, but Artwork being extremely demotivating, Creativity got 3774th place, which was sad for everyone, but enjoyment was ranked lowest, at 4545th place. Absolutely terrible for me, as I thought that I knew a lot about game design and how to make games fun.

In the end we got into the top 30-40%, which considering how our game was at the time and as of today, is probably fair. The most important thing I forgot was to thoroughly playtest the game to the end. And as we heard from all of you, the game ended up being too hard to actually reach the end. 

I asked Jinny and RyGuy what they thought about the project:

Jinny: "Basically torture"

RyGuy: “Would’ve been more fun if I knew what I was doing, I had no clue how to use Godot”

Random: “If you wish to join a game jam, make sure you have way more time to prepare than I did. If you have more time, make a strategy, get a team together (if you want), pray for success, and try not to break yourself in the process.”

Yeah! that's it. I really hope that you guys genuinely liked the game, if you did then that's great! I would love to see your comments,  and if you didn't, I'll make sure the next game is unforgettable.