Hi everyone,

I just wanted to share our game jams experience here and also advertise our games for the weekend. You can also share your experiences and maybe something that might help me and others who might be reading this in their futures.

First of all, I will start with my experience of this game Jam. This is my third game Jam and the first one where I ever had assigned a day for a brainstorming session to think of my objectives for the week. This made a huge difference already compared to the previous jams as I had a clear vision of what I had to do and anytime during my development phase, I felt lost I used to refer to my objectives I set for myself and regain myself and move on.

Even though I set my objectives knowing my limitations and the limited time I could work after my office, I still faced hurdles and cut down my game objectives even more to fit it into my time schedule and finish my game. One of the major ones is setting up my physics-based player controller which I thought would be done in 1-2 hours considering I had previous versions of code for reference, but OHHH GOD WAS I WRONG!!! It took me two days to just set up the player controller and make it work as I wanted. Even on the last day of the game jam I was playing around with some features of the player controller and am really happy with the way it turned out. 

But because of this I had to remove major feature such as turrents/LMG's and boss room from my game but nevertheless I was able to adapt and finally make my game what it is now.

One major thing I realized this game Jam is, even though you are dead set with an idea we will still doubt if it's a good one or should we drop it and think of a better one and start freshly again with our project. I URGE YOU to not do this for any of your project unless you are completely sure that you are not happy with the game you are working on. Otherwise, you will be stuck in the loop of starting multiple new projects and finishing none, which I have been stuck in for the last 2 years sadly. But FINALLY, I am out of the loop and looking forward to many successful projects and great experiences.

KUDOS TO EVERYONE for participating in the GAMEJAM. Hope this story of mine is helpful to you.

Any suggestions are welcome and I also encourage you to share your story so that we all can learn from each other better.

AND FINALLY HERE IS MY GAME: BLOOM TRAP

Rate Bloom Trap by Rockerzz for Brackeys Game Jam 2024.1 - itch.io

I will be free this weekend so looking forward to you games and stories. Have a great day!! :D

This thread is a cool idea!

We have some stuff in common because this is my third game jam too. The way I approached this jam is... work as many hours as humanly possible and shove as much content as I could into the game haha. The first day was brainstorming and setting up basic systems like save/options and then trying to figure out how out the scope. I forgot the cardinal rule of programming though and didn't cut my scope in half, so I was really struggling to get everything in on time and barely made it. 

This was my first story-based game so it was difficult to transition from a mechanics-based perspective but I am decently satisfied with the result. Feel free to check it out here!
https://kylomain.itch.io/generational-drift

This is my forth game jam. I've done the Polymars sea-jam, 2023.1 Brackeys and the 2023 GMTK.

I was very productive on days 1-3 but after that point I slowed down each day. Until the final day, which left me with barely any motivation. That is one reason why if you look on my game's page, it says it was submitted 12 hours before the game ended. That, and it was 10 PM my time, when I finally submitted it. It is basically the definition of minimum viable product.

Here's the page BTW: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2522191

About dropping projects, I used to be guilty of this. What made me stop was having others join my team. It really helped me. Just bouncing ideas off each other really helps. Now me and my team are about to be done with our first public demo!

I would share the page for that game too, But I don't have one for the public yet!

This is my freinds game and i think it is amazing! I think you NEED to check it out! https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2536089?before=3#post-9429915

it is my fourth game jam. I always had a brainstorming session with my team at the start of the game jam. I usually use tools like Whimsical or Miro to do the brainstorming. Our team members are in different parts of the world in this jam, so we work in a different time zone. It added a challenge, but fortunately, we managed it.

The theme was unique, so we came up with a chill game rather than an action game as we knew there would be many teams doing action games and using a door as some sort of portal. we are heavily inspired by Wes Anderson and Stranger Things for the art of this game. The game turned out to be great, but we didn't manage to implement all the features we wanted. We managed to keep the team spirit at 100% for the entire jam! I don't get enough sleep during the jam hahah, but it's all worth it.

It would be great if you could leave a review for our game here: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2531378

Hi, this thread is awesome.

My story is that I am a college professor and a gamedev from Chile looking to get back into indie stuff. We had a big project that got cancelled and game financing is very bad right now, so I formed a team with some people from my game company to do a small indie game for this Jam. We hoped this could be a nice exploration that might give us an idea for a commercial game we could do without external financing. 

Most of my teammates had a lot of work to do during the week, but happily I could take more time off. So we decided to make a game that I could champion and the team helped me with stuff when they were available. Sound effects where done by my team (Sebastián and  Estefanía) and I had a programmer (Felipe) and an animator (Franco) help me with the game in each of their respective areas. The idea of the game was also a collaborative effort.

About time management, we decided to make the game in gameloops that we could close if time run short, and it did run short, so we ended up scrapping the second part of the game, that included a small pokemon GBA fighting parody. Friday and Saturday Felipe and I just stayed up working until 13 minutes before closure. Felipe was in charge of building and submitting the game, as well as the menu and the amazing store page.

We are very happy with the result and we are thinking about dedicating 5 to 7 months after work to try and get a commercial version of this game, let's just hope it works!
The game: Doors, Monsters and Towers https://abstractdigital.itch.io/doors-monstes-and-towers

Edit: I've been in many game jams, but this it the first big online itch.io jam I've participated. My first game ever was done in a small jam in 2011 when I was in college (so long ago already!)

This was my first game jam ever. And here's the story of my game development experience during this jam:

I started Brainstorming ideas for a game as soon as the theme was revealed then 1 day later when I actually got to work on the game I had an idea in mind: game where you fight of zombies. Then I thought about the art style... I'm pretty bad at blender and just picked up MegicaVoxel so I thought why not make voxel Modells. And with some reference for inspiration(true inspection not stealing meant as "inspection" 😂) it was quite easy to make everything that I wanted in MagicaVoxel. Then I got to programming the mechanics on day 3 I believe (I didn't have time to work on the game on day 2) I spent day 3-5 coding stuff and making models when I needed them. Then day 6 arrives and my todo list is relatively full still and I don't have much time to work on the game... 

So I set myself an alarm for 7am and got to work doing everything I possibly can the rest of polishing and finishing the game was done at around 7:45-7:55am. Then what I thought would be the hardest part: uploading to itch.io(because I heard people on YouTube say that some stuff went wrong) but it was extremely easy and straightforward and everything worked perfectly fine. So my game was uploaded at around 8am... 

And that's how BitBrain was made. 

If you want to play my game you can do so  by clicking on this link! https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2535578 I truly hope you will enjoy it! 

return 0;(get it because in programming return 0; would end the Programm and my post is over😂) I admit that that joke wasn't great😂

Hey! I really like the idea.

To my/our story. I am the coder and Maruni is the artist. This is our first game Jam, well second... the first one was 2023 GMTK, but we did get nowhere close after the first day to get a finished game. So this time we knew what to expect. I don't know why but I find it really really hard to build a game which is actually fun.. (if anyone has some tips please let me know :) )

Our goal was to build a very simple game where we can make sure we are able to finish and polish a bit and which has a short playtime, since there are so many games in this gameJam. We settled for a gamedesign after the first day and started building it. Actually it got together quite fast, but the polishing bit felt stressful towards the end. But we kept making a changes to the gamedesign after playtesting to make the game somewhat more fun. I am happy there was a deadline because otherwise I think I would have never been satifisied :')

And this is our result: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2534320

This is my first game jam, and also my first real 3D game!

I'm still going to school and im 15 jears old.

Im so happy for all the positive feedback and im really shocked on how nice everybody in this jam is :)))

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2534908

Hey there, I'm Ayaz, an indie game developer from India. So, This is  my first Game Jam, and let me tell you, it was quite a journey. I worked continuously for 7 days on this project. I poured my heart and soul into this project, all by myself, you know? No help from anyone. I even whipped up some 3D models from scratch!

Now, when they announced the theme, "What's Behind the Door," it took me back to this episode of Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, the one with the Perplexahedron. That got me thinking, and I decided to base my game on that idea. I had tons of plans, you know, but with the limited time, I could only bring about 40% of what I had in mind. Still, I'm proud of what I managed to put together.

During this whole process, I learned a lot. Like, I explored with AI attack systems, which was totally new for me in Unity. And get this, I've only been at this game development thing for about 1.5 years! I dropped out of college to pursue learning game development and graphic design because I believed college wouldn't teach me these skills. Instead, I opted to learn them independently through the internet. I've acquired all my skills as a game developer, such as C# coding and graphic design, for free online. I'm unsure whether my decision was right or wrong, but I put in all my effort and hard work to ensure it was the right one. I can confidently say that I excel at quickly learning and adapting to new technologies and skills. Additionally, my strong foundation in math and physics has made it easier for me to grasp coding and understand the concepts.

Now, here I am, sharing my story with you. It's been quite a journey.

And hey, I'd love it if you could play my game, Perplexahedron. It'll really make my day and make all the hard work worth it. You can find it here: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2535729

For me, it's my seventh game jam.  I've entered all kinds of games; roguelikes, action, survival, strategy, and incremental.  So, I wanted to go with a puzzle game this time around.  I also wanted my game to look more artistic and get away from my safe zone of using Kenney's 1 bit pixel art, not that I have anything against his awesome free collection.  I'd been watching videos on art and wanted to incorporate some of what I'd learnt.  I didn't want to deal with lighting, shadows, materials, reflections and all of those difficult and complex issues, that are especially problematic for web games.  So, I went for a clean, minimalist art style:

I think it turned out quite well.  I'm happy with the feedback I've gotten.

You can play and rate the game: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2530459

Leave a comment on it, if you want me to rate your game otherwise I won't be able to find it.

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2534682 FOR ME IT's my first game jam with my third game i ever made with my low end pc I'm going to join game jams like brakeys and arecola just to make money and get a new pc to make beer games for the future i hope you try my game and rate it as well and support me

https://pandaking976.itch.io/jam-on-toast

This was my first Brakeys jam and 3rd jam overall, the game turned out less polished than we'd hoped due to poor communication but that's ok as we can learn from it next time :D

Feedback would be appreciated.

This was our first game jam, or game we made from start to finish for that matter, as we're all complete beginners 😄 Definitely underestimated each part of the game, how long it will take to make. We felt like if we manage to upload anything at all Sunday, it was already worth it.

I think we learnt more through the 6 days than the past couple of months altogether, the time pressure definitely helps to motivate people. Since we have full-time jobs, we barely had a few hours each day to progress, most of it was done on the weekend, but it was a great experince, and what we didn't expect is the comunity here being this nice and supportive, doesn't feel like the jam is over at all, trying out other people's games and seeing the whole thing unfold is just pure fun!

Hopefull we'll be back at the next Brackeys jam and try to make something once again :)

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2535957

So for my game it was about influences and testing if it would be fun. First I thought what a stupid theme. But then I was watching those door chase montages from scooby doo and I was like wait a minute. 

I was clear about the teleporting doors and someone chasing you but that wasn't enough. I thought that there should be something behind the door and viola the memory match game. Then I realised the enemies get too over whelming which was the point but the player should have a chance to get out of it and then the dodge was born. Last was power ups and within 3.5 -4 days the game was born. Artistically I wanted more but time was less but I'm pretty happy with the sound. 

In my humble opinion games are half about ideas and half about feels. If you have a great idea even if it is implemented in a polished manner if it doesn't feel good the player it won't work and same goes vice versa good feel but not idea makes a bad experience. 

This game was a product of feel and ideas. That moment when you are just about to compete the last door and baddy kills you. Frustrating but lights a fire underneath your butt 

Check it out here

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-11/rate/2535110