We Went Undercover to Win a Massive Game Jam

my name is jonas i'm a game deaf warrior on my way to mastering the ancient art of game development do you hear that noise that's gmtk game gem one of the most dangerous and lethal game making competitions out there thousands of participants meet up here every year thousands of games are created but only a few of them take the trophy and this year i'm gonna be one of them people knew me but i did not want an unfair advantage i wanted to earn it so i brought a cloak a fake identity and i brought a friend your goal over the next 48 hours is to make a game that fits the following theme roll of the dice we have to approach this from the perspective of we want to win this gem or at the very least get top 10. that would be really apricot i think it has to be very easy to play and to understand of course we still also want to have a creative idea that sort of fits the theme but not in an obvious way and it

has to make people feel cool right out of the gate you should probably be able to play through it and finish it in some way satisfying in a couple of minutes i agree you know that game yahtzee or what it's called where you roll a couple of dice and then you can pick which ones you want to re-roll i wonder if we could do something like that but with like way crazier more complex nice combinations are abstract games the way to win in these kind of gems well for that we can take a look at um previous gmt case and see what one yes we're gonna do that whatever it takes that's the concept is solidifying with that that's pretty cool i think this allows for nice eye candy and ear candy it's something that should be simple enough to be able to make it so everybody understands what's going on yeah another big advantage i feel like the the base gameplay should be

relatively easy to code and set up yeah you're certainly uh well familiar with making grid-based systems yep i'll have to see how much grid-based stuff i need to do or if i can just do it with collision checks and stuff like that i feel like that's the fast hacky route hello all righty oh some of them are dark does that mean that they are more sturdy yep okay i'm gonna make a separate sprite for that though yeah that's better yeah i guess it needs to be like really filling this space kind of the only way to make it somewhat believable basically it has to look like it's already gonna have to squeeze through even if all of the blocks are gone yeah and the new day begins in the valley of game development let's go let's go yes i already got a little bit done i'm gonna send or upload a build

oh very nice last night i still drew two quick tests you want to see them yeah okay get ready [Music] [Laughter] i wonder if they even need to be they need to be even bigger to communicate they can't fit through with wall blocks in the way but i think it's also fine to have some wall blocks in the way right but you don't need to get rid of 100 probably yeah was it all smooth sailing of course not we ran into plenty of bugs and technical issues i'm just cutting a lot of those out to speed up the video a bit although we went very competitive this time which is why i didn't record quite as much i was very focused on just doing my best on the game and that was a refreshing experience really can see your learning curve these fire images

by the end of day two this is what we had [Music] recording quick placeholder dice roll [Music] lol i'm really scared if i can implement things as fast as jan can make things he made a sound table now with tons of sounds yeah he's going to make those sounds and then i'll have to implement all of them and in the meanwhile i'll have a billion other tasks to take care of how much time do we have left okay we still got about eight hours or so maybe you can explain those pick graphics a bit to me yeah sure first let's talk about the pig that's inside oh wait um let me see i haven't downloaded it yet does it split into

multiple things yeah yeah it's split into everything so if you want to animate something you can uh okay wait the the pick doesn't leave the frame just oh it doesn't really leave the frame it just comes a little closer maybe if you want hey hello i am talking to you from the other side of the room because i took my microphone to place the recorder sound what's that um now be good time to implement the hand of the front pick for me what do i have to do record this sound and i'll be back at my desk okay okay i was very excited because we were well on our way to scoring one of the top spots in this gem i did in fact implement the hand of the front pick you can see me making some progress on that here getting the animations in you must free your little piggy friend behind the

wall breathe oh this is so cool hey what happened it's very cute it is very cute i'm very heartwarmed oh oh only four hours left less than four hours left i haven't implemented any sounds yet i feel a little stressed and that's why i'm gonna take a break if you wanna become a true master at game development you shall never lose your composure not even at the side of the constantly ticking timer [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] there was an error with your request the website doesn't respond we made it to the finish line now

everybody would have one week to play and rate each other's games after that emperor markley brownlee would announce his top 20 games of the gem crowning the winners we played some games we rated some games i remind you we were still undercover nobody recognized us over 200 people played our game 51 people rated our game and we also got like 44 comments from other gem participants i think that is fantastic news because it proves you do not need the youtube fame in order to be seen the week came to an end and markley brownlee announced the winners of the jam it was time to show you what we made the goal is to set off a chain reaction that frees the piggly behind the wall every die has a little icon on it that shows which direction it'll explode in wait how is this level possible well the twist is you can roll the dice so you have a limited amount of re-rolls to set yourself up for the perfect chain reaction one thing that's not explained very well in the game but that might be very important is that dice have a very

strong tendency to become better when you re-roll them so it's a little bit like you're giving your dice random upgrades by clicking on them there are wooden blocks that take two hits to destroy laser beams that can wipe out an entire row there are lightning strikes that just find the nearest blocks and destroy them with blocks with three lives we have 10 levels and we have a lot of explosions stays clear oh it stays oops mark lee brownlee was ready to announce the winners of the jam and i really want to say no excuses this time we gave it our very best i mean that was the entire point of doing this we wanted to see how far we could push ourselves speaking of game gems and pushing yourselves you're all invited to wowee gem 4.0 my very own game jam we're doing it for the fourth time and it starts in less than two weeks so sign up

follow the link in the description write it into your calendar and now how well did we do for gmtk i cried tears of joy i cried tears of pain out of 6 000 game submissions we made it to play 74. that we were comfortably sitting in the top 2 of all games two years ago we ranked on place 377. last year we landed on play 734 so this is by far our best result yet we even got mark lee brownlee to play our game without ever showing our faces it was an objectively good result yet i did not feel satisfied so i knew what i had to do i would have to return next year and take what's mine [Music] you