Working on my second game jam was an incredibly fun learning experience.
My good buddy Will Spaar and I jumped into
The Worst Game Jam (2025) with one goal in mind—making the best game we could in just nine days.
Having worked together on a previous jam, we had a solid understanding of what to expect and a clear vision for what we wanted to achieve within the limited time. The end result is a game we're both extremely proud of—one that was a ton of fun to create and play!
Radio Quiet
Art: Will Maciejewski
Programmer: Will Spaar
World Building from the Ground Up
Heading into this jam, Will and I had a clear vision of the type of game we wanted to create. Throughout 2024, we found ourselves drawn to two major genres—deck builders and JRPGs—so we set out to combine our favorites: the deck-crafting mechanics of Balatro and the turn-based combat of Persona 3 Reload, all with a touch of Dragon Quest for good measure.
Since we nailed down the core mechanics early in development, we had ample time to focus on seamlessly integrating narrative and setting into the gameplay. To achieve this, we built an extensive word web, asking and answering as many questions as possible to shape the feel of the world. Thanks to this thorough planning, whenever new challenges arose, we felt confident that we already had solutions in place. With such a tight timeline, having a solid foundation in pre-production proved to be absolutely invaluable.
Background, UI, and Blending the Two
Our early background sketches centered around the idea of the game taking place on a grassy field in front of the player character, with both the player and cryptids engaging in a card duel reminiscent of Texas Hold 'Em. The concept included a bar stretching across the center of the screen, rising and falling to reflect who had the advantage, all pulsing to the rhythm of the music. However, as development progressed, we realized that this initial vision wasn’t quite aligning with what truly excited us.
The top-down perspective, while interesting, didn’t allow us to fully showcase the world we had spent so much time conceptualizing. Additionally, the dueling card system, while a cool idea, proved to be too complex to implement within our tight timeline. Early on, we made the decision to pivot to a more traditional first-person JRPG perspective. While it may seem like a significant shift, simplifying the mechanics gave us the opportunity to focus more on art, atmosphere, and gameplay—elements that ultimately made the experience much stronger.
I had a blast creating the moody cel-shaded lighting for the backgrounds and finding just the right balance of color and texture to give the cards and UI a satisfying, papery feel. However, the biggest takeaway for me was designing the environment with the UI in mind—making sure it felt like a natural part of the world rather than an afterthought. While clarity and legibility are always top priorities in animated videos, transitioning to an interactive experience required a shift in mindset, placing accessibility at the forefront. After all, no matter how visually appealing a game is, it won’t be effective if players don’t know where to click. That realization was the most valuable lesson I took away from the jam, and it’s something I’ll definitely be carrying forward into my future projects.
Letting Go of Perfect
I am a chronic sketch tosser. An eagle eyed ease examiner. I worship and pray at the altar of “no bad keyframes” every night before I shut down my MacBook. In simple terms: a perfectionist. So, sitting at my computer at two in the morning, with just eight minutes left before the deadline and an impossible number of tasks still ahead, had me (literally) tearing my hair out. Surely, with less than ten minutes to go, I could just jump into After Effects real quick, whip up a CRT video effect stack, and toss it into Godot before the due date, all while accounting for the five minutes it would take for the build to upload to Itch.
Will and I had poured every spare moment over the past week into this project, but at the end of the day, we were just two people, and there was only so much we could accomplish. From the start, we knew our goals were ambitious, and inevitably, some things would have to be left on the table. But knowing that didn’t make letting go any easier. I had invested so much time and energy into this project—I wanted people to see the best that the game had to offer, the best that I had to offer.
But if I didn’t submit it before the deadline, no one would see anything at all. Letting go of the idea
of perfection was the hardest part of the jam for me.
But I woke up the next morning and you know what, everything was okay! The game wasn’t perfect and knowing that didn’t kill me. I had gotten my first good sleep in a week and the only thing I felt was peace. We had accomplished something big—people were playing our game, my art was out in the world, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Who would have thought?
So, what did I learn from all this? Am I gonna start phoning it in? Definitely not. My standards for myself remain as high as ever, but I’ve realized that maybe I don’t need to be so damn hard on myself when I fall a little short of those expectations. Beating yourself up doesn’t make you better; it just makes it harder to keep going. And if we want to keep doing what we love, we owe it to ourselves to do our best—without being our own worst critics.
