Posted November 25, 2025 by Tokyo Frequency
#Retrospective
Accessibility is Everything: Make your game easy to play—preferably in-browser with no downloads.
Test Early & Often: Browser behavior can differ from local setups—catch issues early.
Iterate Post-Jam: Update gameplay, art, music, and features based on feedback.
Keep Builds Lightweight: Optimize videos, assets, and overall file size for faster loading.
Difficulty & Options: Offer multiple difficulty levels and ways for players to progress.
Art Cohesion: Decide on a clear art direction and stick to it.
Engage Players: Add banter, dynamic responses, or extra interaction to keep things lively.
If there's one key lesson I learned from this game jam, it's that Accessibility is Everything.
You can have the best gameplay in the world, but if it doesn't run easily (i.e. run in browser with no additional setup required, not a download game).
Download Games got significantly less traction than web browser games in Monkey Jam 2025: https://itch.io/jam/monkey-jam-2025
Worse, ours was a web game, but instead of using index.html our file was called story.html, so it wouldn't run by default - you had to setup a local web server to play the game.
One player on discord commented that you "had to be a professor" in order to run the game.
However, it's a lesson learned that I will carry on to the next game jam - so if we look at it from a pure learning perspective, I will never make the mistake again.
Some other smaller lessons I learned, but want to pass on, in case they will be useful to other indie devs:
Game development is like being a blacksmith in the forge - you make something, then make small adjustments until your game is complete.
Things don't have to be perfectly adjusted the first time, get something basic working first, then iterate to improve and streamline it as user feedback comes in.
That's all for now. Hope you learned something, and feel free to comment below if you'd like to share your game jam learnings or accessibility learnings as well.