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Janessa Walpole
Janessa Walpole

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My First Game Jam Experience - GMTK 2026 Retrospective (CHRONOPHOBIA)

#beginners #github #development #gamedev

How I Even Got Here

A few weeks before GMTK 2026, I joined the ASGC (Always Supporting the Games Community) Discord server after stumbling across it on LinkedIn. I wasn't looking for anything specific — just another community to lurk in. Then someone posted looking for programmers for their GMTK 2026 team.

On a whim, I DM'd them.

We clicked immediately, and just like that, I had a team for my first ever game jam. I had no idea what I was walking into. That team went on to build CHRONOPHOBIA (I worked on it under my handle, SabreDorko).

Meet the Team

By the time the jam actually started, our "small team" had somehow grown to 13 people. All but two of us were native Italian speakers. That meant every planning call, every Discord message, every bit of coordination had the potential to spark miscommunication, and the team handled it with more patience and grace than I had any right to expect.

Thirteen people is a lot for a game jam. Up until this point, I'd been a solo dev through and through; Every project I'd touched in the past, I built alone, on my own timeline, making every decision myself. Suddenly I was one voice in a team of thirteen, which meant:

  • Actually agreeing on a single game idea before touching a keyboard
  • Splitting work into tasks that wouldn't step on each other
  • Using GitHub with a large team for the first time — branches, merges, and all the conflict-resolution chaos that comes with more than one person touching the same codebase

None of that is normal solo-dev territory, and it was as much a crash course in team development as it was a game jam.

What I Actually Worked On

I ended up working on two major pieces of the game:

Character controller. I volunteered to build on top of a controller I'd already written, expanding it to support sliding and wall running for the jam's mechanics. Taking something I understood well and stretching it to handle new movement systems under a ticking clock was its own kind of stress test.

UI design. I also ended up doing most of the UI: the title screen, the main HUD, the game over screen, and the tutorial popups. I really liked the VHS aesthetic we were going for and it inspired me to even make the title and game over screens in a 3D scene.

Programmer by trade, UI designer by creative impulse.

The Sleep Deprivation Arc

I will not pretend this was healthy. Most nights I was up until around 5 AM and awake again by 10 or 11. On the final day, as we scrambled to merge everyone's branches and untangle the inevitable conflicts, I stayed up until 8 AM straight.

Somehow, we were all in a Discord call together for most of it — sometimes heads-down coordinating, sometimes just chatting to stay sane. That call was honestly one of my favorite parts of the whole jam.

Reflecting on It

Going in, I expected a rough weekend. What I got was a much rougher weekend than expected — but also a much better experience than expected. Being thrown into a 13-person, mostly-Italian team as a solo dev with zero large-team GitHub experience could have gone badly. Instead, it turned into one of the most fun, most kind development experiences I've had.

We're planning to keep working on the game a bit now that the jam's over — fixing the bugs above, adding a proper options menu, and generally polishing it into something closer to what we envisioned. Less sleep than I bargained for, but absolutely worth it.

And it seems like it's resonated. When results came in, we'd placed within the top 40% across all categories. For my first game jam, and shipped game in general, it performed far better than I had expected. I couldn't be prouder of not only myself, but my team as well.

CHRONOPHOBIA's final ratings within the GMTK 2026 Game Jam

From the Team

I wanted to highlight the rest of the team's experiences during the jam too, so I sent everyone the same six questions. Here's what those who answered had to say.

Questions asked:

  1. What was your role on the project, and how did you end up on this team?
  2. What's a moment from the jam that stuck with you the most?
  3. What was the hardest part of coordinating a 13-person team in 96 hours?
  4. Anything you wish had gone differently, or would do differently next time?
  5. What are you most proud of in the final game?
  6. Any favorite memory from development?

Responses:

Ivan Scappini / Game Designer:

  1. "My role was Game Designer, and I was the first to actually insist on participating in this jam!"
  2. "The final 5 hours. They were so intense!"
  3. "I would say: tracking everyone's work and managing git to prevent conflicts."
  4. "I would scale down some mechanics and focus on ensuring their stability before adding any more."
  5. "We delivered it! Even if it's not perfect, it gives a good atmosphere and good gameplay."
  6. "All the laughs and the fun we had during the everyday calls."

Gabriele Ubertazzi / Narrative Designer:

  1. "I was the Narrative Designer, and I joined thanks to Martina who invited me in."
  2. "Seeing everyone immediately get to work as soon as the theme was announced to start brainstorming — seeing everyone being pro-active boosted my motivation."
  3. "Coordination was less of a problem than scoping, I think. We were constantly in voice channels and people responded quickly, so we coordinated well. While thinking about how many things we could and couldn't do as a 13-person team was quite difficult."
  4. "Case in point, we did slightly overscope, which was a real headache for the programmers. Next time, I would make sure the core mechanics are fewer, almost 'under-scoping,' while still defining other 'nice to have' mechanics, so we can add them if we have extra time, or leave them be and polish what we have if we don't."
  5. "I think the artists and programmers hit the ball out of the park with this one. The overall 'glitched/VHS' feel of the game is really good, and I think the game would feel very different without it."
  6. "Staying up until 4 AM with exhausted programmers to keep them company, dying of laughter at the stupidest jokes."

Lorenzo / Game Designer:

  1. "Part time Game/Level designer."
  2. "Delivery Day. Specifically, the race against time to deliver a product with as few problems as possible."
  3. "Can't answer on this."
  4. "About the product: just a bit of overscope. About me personally: for the next jam, I'd like to take a few days off from work so I can focus on it 100%."
  5. "I think we nailed the atmosphere and mood perfectly, and we stayed true to the theme."
  6. "To see people's passion and diverse skills in action."

Jacopo Ricchetti / Programmer:

  1. "I am a programmer and the designer invited me to participate."
  2. "Staying up for 2 days straight with only 4 hours of sleep."
  3. "Having to coordinate with someone from the other part of the world because when I was asleep they were awake."
  4. "Don't overscope."
  5. "The introduction, when you press start, because I always wanted to code something more narrative."
  6. "The brainrot that caught all of us who were staying up very late."

Martina Tenani / Programmer:

  1. "I was a programmer; Jacopo invited me in."
  2. "Definitely the final two days to deliver the project. I kinda remember it fondly now."
  3. "I think branch/project management has been the hardest part — pulling together all the strings of the different mechanics that were being implemented."
  4. "I will prep more stuff in advance. Some things are really obviously meant to be dragged and dropped inside each project."
  5. "The vibe and the appearance."
  6. "I loved meeting you guys :), I believe that hardships form the best friendships, so I really liked meeting people as driven as you guys."

Steed Cain / Sound Designer:

  1. "I was performing sound design for the music and sound effects. I'm in a few different game dev Discords, and I saw Ivan post that the team was looking for a sound designer. I reached out and the rest is history!"
  2. "The round-robin style of selecting the theme, game mechanics, story, etc. that we all did as soon as the jam was announced. I loved this method to get a fairly large team on the same page quickly to hit the ground running."
  3. "Our team had the added challenge of being split across different time zones, but even though that was a big hurdle, I thought everyone did a great job working around it!"
  4. "I wish I had been more proactive in communicating the exact audio handover pipeline. I mainly just provided the audio files and the programmers handled incorporating them in the engine. I felt a little guilty, as the programmers had a lot on their plate, and I wish I could have made their lives a little easier by taking care of this!"
  5. "I'm super proud that, given the short time and the team size, the game feels unified. Everything from the gameplay, mechanics, art, and sound is all pointing in the same direction."
  6. "How nice everyone was during this process! Everyone was so welcoming and easy to talk to. I hope we can all stay in touch and potentially collaborate more in the future!"

Closing Notes

If you have time, feel free to check out CHRONOPHOBIA on itch.io and my portfolio. I want to keep making games like this, so any support means a lot! Interested in connecting as well? Head on over to my LinkedIn, I'm always looking for new folk to meet! ♥

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