GMTK Jam
2025-08-27
Play on itch.io
Happy August, summer has been flying by!
Not only has August been full of sunny days, heat waves and working until the sun goes down...and also comes back up. It was also time for the GMTK Game Jam 2025! This was our very first game jam as a studio, and also our first ever GMTK game jam! Here I was, working on a major refactor of my main project and feeling like time is running out in every direction. So when I heard about a new game jam, my first thought was *I don't possibly have time for a game jam right now*. And my second thought was, *wellllll, what if I just check out the theme to see...* Turns out the theme was really good, it was 'Loop' and I gave myself a time limit of 1 hour to come up with a feasible idea. If I couldn't come up with a good idea, I wasn't going to jam.
A few minutes passed and I had an idea! My main game already involves a lot of cooking elements, so I already knew I wanted to make a game about food. And the second thing I wanted was the game to be a single screen. Something really simple and very small scoped, so that I could still get other stuff done during the timeframe. The initial idea was to have a never ending loop of making sandwiches to order. Starting with a level 1 sandwich and when you mastered making it, you would get to move up to level 2 sandwiches and so on. Going from jam to peanut butter and jam, to a BLT etc
There would also be 3 stages to each sandwich, toasting the bread, preparing the filling and then putting the top piece of bread on. I had a toaster in mind, to put the bread into and the player would choose how long to toast it, but that felt boring so later the toaster turned into a blow torch, for (much) more efficient toasting. I also thought that just placing a final piece of bread would be boring too, so I added a toothpick topper to place. Based on the desired sandwich output, the player would need to pick the correct topper to place.
With the idea being that each round, a sandwich order would come in, and the player would build it. Get scored and if it was perfect, move on to the next type. With each round of each sandwich being a bit variable. For example, 50% toasted with 50% of strawberry jam and 50% of blueberry jam with a strawberry topper.
In the end, we mostly achieved the goal. I worked on the game from Wednesday evening until Saturday as best I could outside my other work. Joel and I worked together all Saturday and Sunday morning to finish the game off and polish it! Along the way, as with any game jam, some ideas had to be cut. Sandwich levels, out. Custom toasted levels, out. Choosing a topper, out.
Now every sandwich needed to be 100% toasted for perfection, and the final topper just automatically chose the correct type. Time was becoming an issue and sacrifices must be made (to the goddess) if we wanted to be finished on time, without bugs. So the final idea/game was an endless loop of making jam sandwiches. Each sandwich would vary how much of each jam type it wanted, and if you could perfectly do all three stages, you won the game! So we only managed to get one stage of the sandwich in, but it worked out okay. We had to really scale the difficulty up so that the game wasn't just immediately over. In turn, it was really difficult and not many people managed to perfect their sandwich making skills.
What was the biggest technical issue?
This jam actually ran very smoothly. The very initial idea for the game, was spreading jam on toast. So that was the first thing I implemented, and it was a bit janky but it worked exactly as I imagined. In real life, jam is wonky and you can't just evenly spread jam out very easily. I tried my best to replicate that and the feeling of spreading a new type of jam over an existing one. When they overlap it's a bit difficult to tell how much of each jam is on the bread, which is part of the challenge that makes it fun.
Toasting the bread became the most difficult part to implement. Using a shader to mask out the toasted layer was easy enough, but getting the bread to actually LOOK toasted was another problem all together. It was hard to get it to look toasted and also burnt, but not too burnt. In the end I was happy with the result even if it wasn't exactly what I had in mind.
The final stage of the game, seemingly the easiest, is also the hardest to complete. But only on mobile. Due to a small (almost) bug, but not quite a bug which I'll get to, the third stage was not possible on mobile. We built the game for PC, with mobile in mind but we had forgotten to fully test the game on mobile because it just wasn't the focus. Our game almost worked all the way on mobile, but not quite. Maybe next time!
I focused a lot on polishing this game jam, to try and have a neatly wrapped experience with no bugs. I think that I delivered on that goal, and I'm proud of us for what we created across 4 days! And in the end, the ratings showed that our hard work paid off!
Out of ~9600 entries, we placed #243(4.4/5) for artwork, making it one of my (personal) best game jams ever visually! I have been making the sprites for my games for a decade but I would never call myself an artist, although maybe that might need to change! Thanks for reading, and until next month!
- Sarah