We made a game for GMTK Jam 2025: The Waystone Circle

Sources:

GitHub - veloc1/gmtk-jam---loop

Game design document v0.01:

Dropbox

Team:

• ChipTune - idea, game design, balance;
• AlexSilen - art;
• and me - game design, code, music and sfx.

It all started out of nowhere: I saw a jam announcement, I don't even remember where I saw it. I dropped the idea into a few chats, went for a walk and a few beers (Ballmer peak is real). I didn't expect anyone to answer, and was thinking about dropping a few ideas, making basic prototypes and calling it a day. But someone answered, and things started going wild...

Day 0: Idea

Jam theme was "loop". We made a call with Chiptune and started brainstorming. There were a lot of ideas, but we settled on the "reincarnation" concept. The player would make a loop, and there should be some consequences that would resurface on the next cycle. Main references were: Loop Hero, Reigns and Kingdom. A bit later, I added Frieren to this list.

initial storming

The final idea was that the player would journey through the kingdom, collect resources, fight monsters, and rebuild the portal to travel somewhere else.

Some of the other ideas:

• mana doesn't come out of nowhere. To get some mana, the player should corrupt ground and get the mana out of the environment. Corrupted ground would spawn more monsters. It was a main mechanic from another game, maybe someday I will return to that.
• I wanted to use Dual Purpose Design, so everything should have a second reason, or be removed from the game.
• random events. The player could meet someone who would give the player upgrades. It was inspired by Frieren, and I was thinking about swapping out the "souls" resource with "memories".
• season changes. Every season would have buffs and debuffs, and spawn unique monsters

that's closer to the end result

That call lasted for 2 hours, after that we went to sleep.

Day 1: Basic

I wasn't able to sleep for long, wanting to already do something great. After 4 hours of sleep, I started writing the game design document. You can see it in the top part of this post. Even that basic design document helped to structure my thoughts about the game and make a plan. Then Alex joined in. I sent him a list of assets and a palette and started coding afterwards.

First things first, I created the movement system:

but player always stays on the same spot, and everything else moves backwards

After a few hours, Alex sent me the first assets, and I almost immediately placed them into the game and started sending progress gifs:

And there was the first feedback. It motivated me a lot:

first character designs

decorations

But the lack of sleep got to me, so I went to sleep for a few hours after lunch (yeah, I know, my sleep schedule is wild).

Later that day, I created the game map, resource gathering and the aforementioned movement system and went to sleep for 12 hours.

Day 2: Buildings, enemies and lose condition

The second day was filled with lots of things: I created mechanics for buildings, basic fights, we created a first draft for balance, figured out the segment count for desired play length, the game could be finished (but only the lose condition was implemented).

There was a lot of coding, but there was a moment when I described the desired vfx:

In total, I worked for 14 hours straight that day, with breaks for lunch and smoke. And then I crashed for 4 hours of sleep xdd

Day 3: text events, music, sfx, repel and basic tutorial

At the end of the 3rd day, all the basic elements were ready. So I switched to some polish work, some fun things, and was waiting for assets from Alex. Chiptune delivered the first balance version for the resources and enemies at lunch.

From the interesting parts - there was a fight skip mechanic. The player could move through fight segments in 3 ways: fight enemy with fire magic, blow away enemy with wind magic, and endure enemy damage. The last two options would leave the enemy on this segment for the next cycle and the enemy could be upgraded. Back to repel: I always liked SMT IV wind attack and wanted to do something similar. The end result looks pretty (but we're rotating pixels 😠):

Oh, and I slept for 13 hours that day :devil:

Last day

The day started with a message containing ALL assets from Alex. That's a good start.

programmer art vs artist art

The first half of the day I was adding new assets, new enemies, new buildings. Then came the balance pass, checking that the game could be completed. Later - sfx. In the last hours I added segment randomization and building deterioration. And then we found out that some of the new mechanics broke the html export. And itch was down. And the music wasn't working in the html build. Not a pleasant release, I'd say, but somehow I expected this. The deadline was moved one hour away, and that helped us fix those bugs, add the main menu and prepare a good build. A few bugs got shipped, but that's the nature of jams.

We even have good reviews so far, and I'm glad we have that:

font was not so good, but I wanted something gothic

What was good

• Focus on gameplay and content. Usually, I focus on gameplay mechanics, but this time I limited myself with mechanics and wanted to add new events quickly. So I implemented mechanics very quickly and tried to generalize code as much as possible on the second pass. And this worked out great.
• Team. I usually go solo. But with help from others, everything goes much easier. And the last hours call was super helpful and kept stress away.
• Chill time. Even when I worked some days for 14 hours, I always listened to my body. If I wasn't feeling well, I wouldn't push myself.
• ABZ. Productivity technique. First, we start with A and Z, where we are now, and where we want to be. And then, we write down B - the next immediate task that will move us closer to Z.