Introduction

Hello, world!

We are a small team of four friends who worked together on Ghoast during Jamsepticeye 2025. A quick introduction to each of us:

• Ociabbey – developer and artist, focused on environment design, UI, and game juice. Long-time developer, fairly new to game dev.
• Chocodave – developer and game design, focused on designing game mechanics, puzzles, and the game level. New to coding, new to game dev.
• aMadReason – core developer, focused on coding game mechanics and player character. Long-time developer, also fairly new to game dev.
• Ociamike – developer and audio, focused on audio/sound design and game juice. New to coding, new to game dev.

This was our first time working together on a game as a team, our first ever game jam, and our first time ever publishing a game to anyone other than our friends.

Preparation

We took some time to prepare a couple of days ahead of the jam, coming up with as many theme-neutral ideas as we could. We went everywhere from 2d topdown adventure, to traditional puzzle game, to colony base-building.

On a real-life level of preparation – some of us prepared meals for ourselves for the next few days, or at least prepared exactly what we needed to make. Abbey and Mike had a parent look after their dogs so they got some attention and wouldn’t otherwise have us sitting at our computers ignoring them for days.

We also scheduled time for coffee – the most important factor of all.

Challenges (and how we resolved them)

• Overlapping work - once we had the main level scene, we wanted to be working in that file for various reasons. We were wary we would get merge conflicts and we didn't want to risk losing progress - however, we wasted a lot of individual time doing this.
  • We overcame this by splitting elements of the game off into their own scenes so that we could create and work on various elements to then be brought together at the end.
• The desire to recode and reorganise was strong - we held off, but as a result the finished project is kind of a mess. We felt that iterating on code and refactoring was something we just didn’t have time for if we wanted a complete experience by the end of the jam. This is fine, we have all the time in the world to refactor now!
  • We overcame this by just getting it working and then moving on. This was SO painful for the experienced developers of the team!
• Time management – we just hit the gas and kept going, essentially. We struggled to schedule our tasks and time effectively, and this is a big area that we’re looking to improve on the next time we do a game jam as it had such an impact on the game itself, what we could work on, but also our levels of fatigue and mental health throughout the jam. This turned into sleep issues as well, meaning we didn’t get good rest throughout the jam, and by the end of it we were exhausted.
  • We overcame poor time management by going into crunch mode, essentially – something we wish to never do again, it’s not a desirable practice.
• Crunch - we were fatigued by day 3 and realised what we were (voluntarily) doing to ourselves was the equivalent of crunch in the real world. We briefly discussed the ethics of game jams potentially encouraging the expectation of crunch in game studios, which we are all heavily against as a concept. Ultimately though, this was a voluntary project that we decided to spend time on, rather than being expected to by a manager in an office somewhere.
  • Coffee. Lots of coffee

New Concepts

A few of the concepts we used were new to some of us in the team, so we thought we’d expand on them here for those who might also be unfamiliar!

• Coyote Time – a way of giving some leniency to the player by giving them some “air time”. If you’ve ever overestimated a platform and fallen off the edge, but still been able to jump – that’s Coyote Time. This was implemented on day 3 by Chocodave after the two experienced programmers, Ociabbey and aMadReason, (who tend to struggle with platformers), were indeed struggling with playing through our platformer.
• Parallax – while Ociabbey had tinkered with parallax a bit before, it definitely wasn’t to the extent we used it in Ghoast. Having several different layers all at different scales and positions was challenging, and we sort of made it up as we went – will definitely be looking into some best practices for it going forward!
• Shaders – Applying shaders was an entirely new practice for Ociamike and Chocodave in this game jam, but we all got through it together.

Scope Creep

We identified very early on that a few of the ideas we wanted to add would be too much, so we relegated them to our Scope Creep List:

• Enemies
• Secret rooms
• Secret passages/walls only the ghost can travel through
• Additional abilities, such as double jump

These are essentially the next things that would have been added during the jam.

How We Can Improve

• We’ve discussed potentially taking shifts so that we can have longer breaks, it would also free up files for other people to work on.
• Restrict our work to 8-9 hours a day per person. For this jam, we would all jump on a call at 9-10am and still be up working at midnight. Fun for the first day or two, but every day for four days is too much.
  • This lines up well with the idea of taking shifts – two can be working from 9am to 5pm, the other two can jump on at 4pm, have an hour of catch up and work organisation, and then work until midnight. This way there’s minimal overlap, everyone is getting plenty of rest and time with their family. It also streamlines work a bit, there’s no time when someone is sitting around doing nothing because they’re waiting to get into a specific file.
• Properly organise our tasks into bite-size chunks. People can then grab something from a list and work on individual scenes, so there’s no overlapping and everyone knows what they can do to contribute.

Will we continue with Ghoast?

It’s not off the table. We originally came into this as aMadReason and Ociabbey had never done a game jam before, they have been teaching Ociamike and Chocodave to code for the past year, so figured it was a good opportunity to try working as a team, learn how to make a prototype game, and publish it. We always intended it to be a throwaway experience so we could trial how we worked together, then move forward and start making games as a team.

What ended up happening was our “all or nothing” mentalities kicked in. We picked a concept we liked and started working hard on making it the best we possibly could in such a short time. We got through the other side with a game we were proud of.

Turns out, we do work pretty well together. Yay!

As for whether we will continue with Ghoast – like I said, it’s not off the table. We did enjoy making it, so it’s something we could enjoy working on. It largely depends on the reception of the game post-jam, if it gets any further attention from the itch community at large, and if there’s any demand for it.

Funny Moments

• We started the project with pixel assets – we’d mostly been making pixel games before this, but when browsing asset packs the Moss environment tiles stood out to us. We quickly realised that we really liked that aesthetic and tried to find a character that would fit into it – then we found the goat (it’s actually a sheep!). When we imported the character, the size of the original assets was so small that we hadn’t needed to scale then down. Suddenly this giant goat face was taking up ½ of the screen – it gave us a bit of a jump-scare! (recreated below)

• About halfway through, we looked at the assets we’d chosen and how they were being used and realised that Ghoast was an accidental homage to Hollow Knight/Silksong. Completely unintentional, but we can clearly see how we were inspired by the games!
• aMadReason spent an ungodly amount of time making sure the blocks could be pushed onto the pressure plates. (We never used the block with the pressure plates. She only hates us a little bit!)

Something nobody has discovered yet (that we’re aware of!):

• Standing underneath a push-block while it’s falling will kill you!

Finally…

Overall, this game jam has been an absolute blast from beginning to end! This week, we’ve played SO. MANY. GAMES. And there have been loads of submissions with really strong contenders! We’re grateful to the amazing community here, to the hosts for organising and moderating, and to all the aspiring game devs who have created something and been brave enough to share it!

Congratulations to everyone, we did it!