Treating a Game Jam as a Product Hypothesis

#gamedev #godot #marketing #gamedesign

You can use a Game Jam to build a fun little prototype. Or... you can use it as a test site to validate a bold product strategy. We chose the latter.

So we just finished the #GMTKJam 2026. Usually, developers drop their links asking to "rate our effort". But let's be honest: I don't need traffic to stroke my ego. For me, this project is a little marketing and design hypothesis with one clear goal:

🔥 10,000 views.

To aim for such numbers in an ocean of thousands of games, we had to step on our own throats. On Day 1, we killed several perfectly working concepts simply because they lacked the "spark".

Instead, we bet everything on VIBE.

I used to preach with a smart face that "Mechanics are everything, visuals are just a wrapper." This game is kinda a crash test for my own design snobbery. I wanted to see if a tightly compressed "vibe" and monolithic packaging could carry a project with extremely simple gameplay.

A detailed post-mortem with metrics and design failures is coming next month. Until then, here are 3 takeaways we learned the hard way:

Research Rules: Stop obsessing over the current meta. We dug up "Morra" (an ancient hand game), rebuilt it with a brutal Buckshot Roulette vibe, and got a mechanic we are proud of. Look for inspiration outside of video games.
Prototype Fast: I will never stop saying this — test your hypotheses on matches and paper. Don't waste time on code until the game feel and math of the rules brings you joy.
Be a Punk: Don't try to please everyone. Design a monolithic aesthetic. "Rules are made by those who are afraid to make mistakes." We subordinated everything to one idea: from naming to the exact timing of our GIFs.

Will this calculation work? We will find out soon. Become a lever in this viral experiment, click the links below, and judge for yourself!