Making a Game in Five Days – Part 5

Welcome to the final entry in my series of posts about making a game in five days! The GMC Jam 57 is nearly over and my entry, Let Me Just Use This For A Second, is finished!

To be honest I haven’t used any of this last calendar day (November 3rd) for active development. After making yesterday’s devlog post I added a bunch of new stuff to the game and then made a final build. Today I have just been prettying up the game’s itch page and writing this final devlog before the deadline hits.

So what did I get done yesterday?

Secret Quests

After finishing the main quest of the game yesterday, I wanted to add as much new content as possible before the deadline. This included adding new items to pick up, characters to meet and puzzles to solve.

I added a new system of “Secret Quests” into the game, where uncovering certain interactions between items will earn you a little celebratory animation. There are four of these quests in total, in addition to the main quest of collecting artifacts to take back to the starting area.

Finishing the Game

With new quests added and bedtime approaching, I wanted to round off the project and call it a night. I polished a few little areas that had minor issues and sent the game around to a few friends to test. The response was overwhelmingly positive and I’m extremely grateful to those people who helped me out!

With the game (hopefully) bug free and ready to ship, I uploaded the final build to Itch and entered it in the GMC Jam topic. This morning, I made the itch page a little bit prettier and wrote this devlog… and that’s the game 100% complete!

Time Taken

As you can see from the screenshot of GameMaker above, I first created the project on October 30th and had it open for 32 hours and 28 minutes. Since I made all the graphics inside GameMaker this time, and left the project open while recording my sound effects, this is a true reflection of the time taken. A game made in five days, as per the title of this blog series!

I hope that seeing how I pieced together this jam entry across the five days will help you with your own jam games and quick projects. My key takeaways for making a game on a tight deadline are:

• Keep things simple – don’t plan to do more than you can in the jam’s time frame.
• Make the base mechanics solid within day 1.
• Finish the beginning and the ending of the game before sandwiching content in the middle, so that you can submit your game any time before the deadline.
• Add content in the middle of the game in manageable chunks.

Thank you for joining me on this journey through GMC Jam 57, I hope you enjoyed this series of devlogs!