I made a game in 96 hours!

My entry for the GMTK Game Jam

Hallå pals!

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

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I spent the last 96 hours working on my entry for the 2024 GMTK Game Jam, so I didn’t have time to write today’s issue of Indie Notebook yesterday!

The GMTK Game Jam is one of the biggest game jams around and they usually have fun prompts (+ your game will appear in a cool Youtube video if it’s rated highly). I tried to do it once or twice before but never had enough motivation to go all the way through with it.

This year was different.

GMTK Game Jam 2024

This year’s theme was “built to scale.” They announced it on the evening of Friday, I thought of as many ideas as I could, I wrote down about 17. To be honest, they were all sort of crap.

Ultimately I thought “Vampire Survivors kinda builds to scale in different ways, you get stronger and the difficulty ramps up”, I just added the twist that you don’t play as the character who grows in power, instead you play as something small that always stays fragile and there’s a big boss-like thing that follows you around and helps you and gets stronger instead.

I didn’t feel like it was the most fitting idea for the theme, but it was the only one I felt excited for so I just went for it. I slept on the idea and got started on it the next morning.

I jumped straight into coding with no clear idea of what the setting or characters would look like. While I was hammering away on the keyboard I was sort of processing in the back of my mind what this thing would be. I actually didn’t think I would come up anything cool at all in such a short time. I expected it to turn out mediocre and placeholder-y.

With so little time to complete the game I just had to go with whatever I could think of, without second guessing anything.

I was thinking of Tingle, Katamari and Doshin The Giant (which isn’t unusual for me, I often think about them).

This is Doshin The Giant, an old Gamecube game. I never tried it but it looks cool.

My giant would be shooting lots of projectiles and using abilities like healing the player and spinning stuff around. I thought magic can explain most things so I decided to make it a wizard.

And witches have cats, so wizards maybe do too.

I started modeling my giant character after scrawling literally one doodle in my sketchbook.

When I got to this stage I first made a pair of tiny, black, dot eyes. But it felt so bland.

I made a pair of detailed eyes as a joke and made myself laugh, so I kept it.

And then I made the cat. Then I thought, “ok now I know what this is.”

I made some enemies that run towards the player. When they die you pick up their XP and level up the wizard, then you get to pick new spells. I didn’t have to think too much about game design because I was mostly following the template of Vampire Survivors and Core Fault, that saved me a lot of time.

A friend did some last minute testing, I fixed one pretty serious bug that he found and ramped up the difficulty a bit. Then the very last thing I did before submitting was to add a butt crack to the wizard.

You can download and play it right now!

🔪 A Vampire Survivor where you play as the defenceless kitten of a BIG Wizard.

❤️ Let his love protect you and try to stay alive for as long as possible.

The controls are super simple, you just use WASD or the arrow keys to walk around. And mouse click to pick an upgrade every now and then.

If you do end up giving it a try, please rate it here. It improve my chances of getting the game to appear in the Youtube video announcing the winners. 🙏🏻

It runs on both Windows and Mac.

I didn’t think or do much to anything else besides game jamming these last four days. But I STILL want to keep working on it. I have so many ideas on how to improve it and expand it. I wish I had it on Switch so I could keep playing it on the couch. It was a really really fun game to make and also to play.

Let me know what you think! Now I got some freelance work to get back to!

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❓ Question time

Did you participate in the GMTK Game Jam? Or what’s the last jam you entered?

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Panel of the week

(from Space Deer)

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The best way to support me right now is by playing and rating Big Wizard’s Kitten!!!

Thank you as always for reading Indie Notebook! Take care and have a creative week.