itch.io

Don't have a way to plan / co-ordinate tasks? Looking for a gamified version to "slay" this jam? I got some great feedback idea and have added a template for this jam to  https://www.frostfire.site there choose template "Brackeys game jam" with some starter items to get you started in no time :)

- starter tickets & milestones

- Sprint set with the end date of the jam

- Roles & labels all preset so you can start right away

Have fun with the jam! <3 (Ps: if you have a team larger then 2 hit me up on discord and ill upgrade the workspace for you .blacktear)

(some general tipps regardless of if you end up using this or any other site / medium to track / co-ordinate: /jam/brackeys-16/topic/6821080/how-to-plan-and-manage-your-game-j...

Howto new users:
Existing users: Go to Create new Workspace -> "Create from Template" -> "Brackeys Game Jam"

If anyone wants to use it feel free :)

- A poker game but everyone can choose an item to cheat (mirror to see one opponents cards, extra ace up the sleeve) 

- Another one also building on the same would be a simplified version "guess my number" where you have to roll 3x dies, and everyone has to say a number, the one with the highest number wins, if you challenge and are right, you win, if you challenge and are wrong you loose, if you are the last person and no one has challenged beforehand, the last person wins.

- Shop keeper game where half of the items are cursed, you need to determine which one are "good deals" and which ones are "too good to be true"

Here there, I wrote my general tipps for what to watch out for and how to work as a team here:
/jam/brackeys-16/topic/6821080/how-to-plan-and-manage-your-game-j...

Hi - thinking of creating a new team, or do you have a spot for another programmer (15+years experience) / pm where you ended up? :) UTC+1

Are you still looking? Trying to create a small team of experts like yourself last minute :)

Hi there!

If you have a team and could use someone who can write complex backend systems fast, I would love to help out! Open to team of all sizes with members that are 25+. I can also help with the  Project Management or IT side of things. UTC+1 timezone, but can make it work with most timezones :)

discord: .blacktear

Treat this as "I need to submit something, anything" jam. Before the jam starts 

• make sure you know how to output *something* that you can upload to itch.io. 
• Learn how to make a Main Menu that goes to your game
• Decide beforehand what you want to do. If you are doing tutorials -> make a game similar to the tutorials, you don't want to start completely fresh, but with something you have recently been doing.  

This is what you can already do now before the jam starts to make it easier in the jam. Best of luck, and remember to have fun :)

Game jams are exciting, but once you have more than one or two people on a team, things can become chaotic quickly.

Tasks get forgotten, people work on different priorities, and the game can end up with lots of half-finished features instead of one small, playable experience.

The tool you use matters less than having a simple workflow everyone actually follows. Jira, Trello, Notion, or even a shared document can work. The important thing is keeping the team aligned.

When we used Jira last time, we ended up throwing that out and went to a Notepad instead which we would just past in Discord after our daily sync xD

Before you start

Start with a backlog of ideas and tasks, then divide them into:

• Must have
• Nice to have
• Only if there is time

For each task, decide:

• Who owns it
• What “finished” means
• Whether anything depends on it
• Roughly how long it should take

Try to define the smallest playable version of your game before you begin. For example:

• One playable level
• One core mechanic
• One enemy or obstacle
• One basic progression loop
• A start screen and an end state

Everything else is optional until that foundation works.

Use a simple board

A basic workflow is usually enough:

Backlog → Ready → In progress → Review → Done

Avoid having everyone work on too many tasks at once. A smaller number of completed tasks is more valuable than a large number of unfinished ones. With this it also is more clear who is working on what and makes collaboration a lot easier.

During the jam

Have a short check-in each day. Everyone can answer:

• What did I finish?
• What am I working on next?
• Am I blocked?

Keep the board up to date so it reflects what is actually happening. If someone is blocked, make it visible quickly. One blocked task can sometimes hold up several other people.

Also, agree on a feature freeze before the deadline (set this up beforehand and stick to it, it's hard but a small polished jam game is better then a feature packed unpolished monster :D). After that point, focus on:

• Fixing crashes
• Improving controls
• Testing the exported build
• Adding polish and feedback
• Preparing screenshots and the submission page

Adding a large untested feature during the final hours is usually risky (but also very game jam typical *guilty*).

After the jam

Take 15 minutes for a quick retrospective:

• What worked well?
• What caused delays?
• Which tasks were underestimated?
• What should we do differently next time?
• What should we keep?

A short retrospective can make the next jam much smoother, even if you don't jam with the same people next time.

A tool I have been building

I have been working on FrostFire, a project-management workspace made for small game teams.

It includes:

• Task assignment and tracking
• Sprint planning
• Meeting notes
• Retrospectives
• Releases
• Team progress and rewards

I originally built it for my own team, and three other teams are now testing it. I’m looking for a few more teams to try it during the upcoming game jam and give me honest feedback.

If your team has more than two people, send me a message and I’ll upgrade your board to support the full team size for free. I can also help set it up around your workflow.

There’s no obligation to keep using it. I’m mainly interested in seeing how real game-jam teams use it and learning what is useful, confusing, or still missing.

You can take a look here:

frostfire.site

Good luck with the jam!

Game jams are exciting, but once you have more than one or two people on a team, things can become chaotic quickly.

Tasks get forgotten, people work on different priorities, and the game can end up with lots of half-finished features instead of one small, playable experience.

The tool you use matters less than having a simple workflow everyone actually follows. Jira, Trello, Notion, or even a shared document can work. The important thing is keeping the team aligned.

When we used Jira last time, we ended up throwing that out and went to a Notepad instead which we would just past in Discord after our daily sync xD

Before you start

Start with a backlog of ideas and tasks, then divide them into:

• Must have
• Nice to have
• Only if there is time

For each task, decide:

• Who owns it
• What “finished” means
• Whether anything depends on it
• Roughly how long it should take

Try to define the smallest playable version of your game before you begin. For example:

• One playable level
• One core mechanic
• One enemy or obstacle
• One basic progression loop
• A start screen and an end state

Everything else is optional until that foundation works.

Use a simple board

A basic workflow is usually enough:

Backlog → Ready → In progress → Review → Done

Avoid having everyone work on too many tasks at once. A smaller number of completed tasks is more valuable than a large number of unfinished ones. With this it also is more clear who is working on what and makes collaboration a lot easier.

During the jam

Have a short check-in each day. Everyone can answer:

• What did I finish?
• What am I working on next?
• Am I blocked?

Keep the board up to date so it reflects what is actually happening. If someone is blocked, make it visible quickly. One blocked task can sometimes hold up several other people.

Also, agree on a feature freeze before the deadline (set this up beforehand and stick to it, it's hard but a small polished jam game is better then a feature packed unpolished monster :D). After that point, focus on:

• Fixing crashes
• Improving controls
• Testing the exported build
• Adding polish and feedback
• Preparing screenshots and the submission page

Adding a large untested feature during the final hours is usually risky (but also very game jam typical *guilty*).

After the jam

Take 15 minutes for a quick retrospective:

• What worked well?
• What caused delays?
• Which tasks were underestimated?
• What should we do differently next time?
• What should we keep?

A short retrospective can make the next jam much smoother, even if you don't jam with the same people next time.

A tool I have been building

I have been working on FrostFire, a project-management workspace made for small game teams.

It includes:

• Task assignment and tracking
• Sprint planning
• Meeting notes
• Retrospectives
• Releases
• Team progress and rewards

I originally built it for my own team, and three other teams are now testing it. I’m looking for a few more teams to try it during the upcoming game jam and give me honest feedback.

If your team has more than two people, send me a message and I’ll upgrade your board to support the full team size for free. I can also help set it up around your workflow.

There’s no obligation to keep using it. I’m mainly interested in seeing how real game-jam teams use it and learning what is useful, confusing, or still missing.

You can take a look here:

frostfire.site

Good luck with the jam!

Thanks :)

Yeah that's probably the hardest one xD

What a great submission! I got 4 of the endings so far — a really impressive amount of variation for a 48-hour jam project! The intro cinematic has a few rough edges (for instance, some clipping through objects and a bit of camera drift), but the overall quality and the strong voice acting & atmosphere make up for it quickly.

What stands out most is the tension between stillness and urgency, which really captures the “Timeless” theme beautifully. The countdown mechanic creates genuine pressure, though why are the two robots not frozen in time, while the one carrying the cube is? 
The Endings are currently not really shown what kind of "impact" they have, if you plan to build this game into a full release (which I hope you do) consider adding an outro that matches the quality of the intro.

Thank you for the amazing comment! <3

Thanks for playing :) It definitely would have benifitted from more polish. *hint* With the compare Node you can also "connect back to an ealiert node" and create a time loop

Ah, you have ended up in the "game over phase", since the "current time" does not equal the "target time" (top bar). Hit "reset" and add the cogs (bottom area) by dragging the ones you need into the scenes, and wiring them up to get from the start to the end time. - We did have a "game over, try again" screen, but that broke somewhere along the way without us noticing until it was too late to fix.

Hey there. Did you connect all the connection point's from the start node, to the nodes you want to add, to the end node?  (see screenshot for an example) 

Thank you :)

Wonderfully relaxing game! Well done making it in such a short time

Thanks for the feedback! It's better in full screen, but I agree the font is not perfect.

Really amazing game, the amount you have done in the short time of the jam is inspiring! though there are some bugs, I found the workarounds did indeed work :D First I thought I had to send the "child" far away, never came back, still feel horrible for it xD

Thanks for the kind review :)

Yeah the popover could have benefitted a lot from a bit of polishing xD glad you found it after all 

I would love to try and help you, can you send a screenshot so I can attempt to debug what is going on?

Thanks for sharing!

Hell yeah! This was so much fun, I opted for dash time decrease and was a dashing hero at the end. what a fun entry! 

Amazing entry! The weights are your friend as you can glide up them, almost as happy to see them as a companion cube :D With a split keyboard these games are hard - should have used a regular one. I think I got a spot on the 11th place, which ill take (though wanted top 10) - amazing adding a leaderboard in such short amount of time, I remember adding one to one of our jam games a while back and it took about half a day to get it working (was a 7 day jam), so to have that in a 48 hour jam is impressive! 

<3 

Thank you for the great feedback. We did a have a "loose" screen that highlighted the different times and had a message "you need to make sure everythign is connected" (but that got lost along the builds) and we did plan to add a "check" so you could only hit play if everything was at least connected. 

Thank you for the awesome comment! 
The last level was indeed a lot easier, at first it intended to be super hard, but designing a hard one took a lot longer than we inticipated. So in order to have a working one, we decided to just make it "a final adjustment". We would also have loved to create an ending, ended up fixing some bugs and adding a minimalitic tutorial instead with the time we had left.     

Thank you for the amazing comment. Glad you sticked with it and enjoyed it till the end. Yeah we changed the font 1hour before submission. Don't like the 4 and the + does look like a - .... 

Tried with Firefox - I'll try with a chromium browser when at pc again :) Though I did play a couple of WebGL submissions in the same browser.

Did you connect all the nodes? (there needs to be a flow from starting node to end node)

Don't know why but this game would not load for me. Got the Unity Splashscreen but then just gray. Waited a minute, then refreshed and tried again and the same. Shame, screenshot look very promising! (not rating, I'll try again later)

Great submission. I really liked the art style and the way we got to know the characters

Great submission! What a fun game, I would have made the upgrades fewer but increased their impact, right now it's more of a chore to upgrade, but if you don't the game get's really hard fast. I can see this being a successful mobile game if taken further.

Subtle with alarm sirens and a countdown made me miss them. xD If I find the time I'll come back and try to "waste a couple of runs" to look for them :)

I tried but could not figure out what to do, tried looking at the screenshots but gave up in the end, which is a shame because this is such a cool looking game! the use of the Asstes is great and the atmophere is captivating!

Great submission, a hint on what you need to interact with (assume one terminal per number) would help alot.

Cute robot with matching music! Great use of the Assets!

thanks for playing and the encouraging feedback <3

Thanks for playing! Yeah depending on what is happening the camera system is ok, but not great. A new and improved version was on the works but never made it in.

thanks for the comment and for playing  :)

Spent way too much time on the page so we did not end up with a  "oh yeah we also need a page " 30min before submission,  not like that ever happened ;)

Thankfully the xp slider is display only so you should not be able to exploit the bug to level up xD