How to Jam

  • Created 31 October 2025
  • Updated 01 November 2025

My game Godscrown placed first overall in the Cosmic Horrors Game Jam IV! I really spent a lot of time polishing the game and ensuring anyone could just pick it up and go, and I think that helped a ton when it came to ratings. There’s many little tips and tricks I learned from past jams and this jam, a lot of it you can learn from my Retrospectives, but I’d like a unified place I can link people to when they need help jamming, so here we go!

Tips

These tips will be a mix of things I’ve learned from all of my jamming experience (About 7 jams submitted to, much more joined and failed.) Some tips come from others! Got some tips of your own, feel free to let me know and I’ll update the page! I’ll do my best to

Define Goals.

Game Jams can teach many skills, but if you’re not actively setting goals, it can be hard to feel that growth. Many jams I’ve taken part of in the past feel like wasted time because I didn’t set goals, and instead just set out to make a game. That’s not nearly enough, and is a given in a game jam. For the Cosmic Horrors Game Jam, I set out to work on my art skills. This prioritized the art of the game over the design and coding work, and as a result I chose a scope that was easy to code and within my art skills, so, no animations, customization, or

Find your Key Pillars

Key pillars are beacons for your design to play off of. For game jams, often this is the theme of the jam, but you might discover other pillars to play off of, a setting, or emotion. Your mechanics, art, and audio should all reference those pillars, if they don’t align, then something should change. I’ve found this really helps limit scope creep, and it’s something to constantly keep in mind as you design.

Tutorials are Required

A good game pushes the boundaries of what its genre and expectations are. Your players need to be in the loop on what those boundaries are and how this game differs. I’ve seen a lot of games put a how to play on the itch page itself, but you can’t guarantee a player will be able to reference it while playing, and walls of text can be difficult to digest. I’ve found the best way to add a tutorial is to do so while playing. The more you can break up complex gameplay, the better, and if you can hide the tutorial entirely, perfect.

Get your Team Together!

Admittedly I didn’t put much thought into sound and music myself, and I picked up my team members later into the jam, by the time they joined the game was nearly finished and I was set out to polish mechanics and menus. They didn’t get a chance to really influence the design and this probably sucked from their perspective. I think it’s best when all teammates are invested in the jam, and part of that investment is to have a stake in the results by guiding its development.

Get Playtest Feedback Early

Getting player feedback can help development figure out QoL and bug fixes. The earlier you can do this the better, preferably before submitting the game to the jam. I was lucky enough to do this in the Cosmic Horrors Jam, and this drove the priority of adding tutorials and UI polishing.

Over-communicate the Vision to the Team

A team setting requires everyone to be on the same page. In Niel McLaren’s game Unearthed, they mentioned having to draw up storyboards of the scenes and gameplay they wanted and that helped explain the idea. You can read more in their retrospective about the jam here.

Prioritize User Experience

A good looking game can have bad user experience and drive people away, but a bad game can have great UX and people will keep playing forever. Focus on how easily the player can get into the game and get to the fun.

Everyone has a Task

Make sure everyone in your team has a task and knows what their job is in the jam. It helps to set up a kanban board in which you can assign everyone to tasks, this is something I’ve done in the past when multiple team members work in the same skill set such as having multiple developers or something.

Don’t forget about the Itch Page!

It’s very easy to forget about the final itch page. I’ve found it’s best to set up the page and add a build as soon as playtesting can be done, this gives me time to add the assets to make the page stand out

Credits

Many of these tips came from folks other than me and then mashed up together into this document! Here’s some links to the relevant sources!