Sneakerdoodle and The Quest for Pets

A cute noir game about a dog that me and 8 other people made for GMTK Game Jam 2023.

Game jam theme

Roles reversed

Behind the scenes

I wanted to meet cool new people, so I decided that I'll look for a big team this time. I used GMTK's team finder and their discord servers and after some reading and messaging, I found a team that needed more devs, and they already had some which was nice, as I wanted to do a reasonably chillaxed game jam... as in, one where I can sleep a normal amount of hours and not be worried about it. :D

We joined up in a discord server and started talking. Apparently they (mostly) found each other the same way... so we were a team of 9 kinda random people :D That got me worried there for a moment, but it turned out great as everyone was very friendly and excited to have fun and create something cool!

When theme was announced we started brainstorming. We discussed various ideas, but we mostly gathered around variations of reverse stealth - a game where you want to be seen. We had two main candidates:

1. A turn-based puzzle game where you have to plan your moves and where and how to get seen

2. A faster paced action/arcade game where you run around trying to be seen as much as possible

More people preferred the second idea - it seemed cute and casual - so that's what we went for.

Vexen - our team lead - kept us nicely organized, and so work on the game went pretty well and at a good pace. We had most of the features implemented on the first day, so on second day we had a lot of time to polish and create content - the levels and their narrative.

The game ended up being in the top 100 games of the jam based on ratings, and then it was featured in a video on GMTK's youtube channel where they show a little from their top 20 picks (out of the top 100).