Introduction

🎥 BTW, here’s a video version if you’re lazy to read: Making A Game With Miniscript With No Experience

Ever wondered what happens if you waste Day 1 of a 48-hour game jam watching a random livestream?
Yeah... I lived that nightmare.

This is the chaotic story of how I panic-coded a game in the last few hours, barely held it together, and somehow managed to submit. Welcome to Jamlog 1: Micro Jam 40.

What is a Game Jam?

A Game Jam is a hackathon for games. It's an event (either online or in person) where solo devs or teams come together to create a video game from scratch within a super tight time limit — usually 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, or sometimes even a week.

The whole vibe is creativity under pressure. There’s usually a theme like “Only One Button” or “Out of Control,” and devs gotta design, code, art, and sound their way around that theme to drop a playable game before the clock hits zero.

What About Micro Jam?

Micro Jam is a bi-weekly 48-hour game Jam (game development competition) held on itch.io. It Jam has a pre-set theme and a surprise prerequisite that is divulged once the Jam starts.

Micro Jam 40

Theme: Magic
Prerequisite: Death is your friend
Timings: May 31st, 2025, at 4:30 AM to June 2nd, 2025, at 4:30 AM (According to Indian Standard Time (IST))

Day 1

This was my 4th Game Jam. Previous ones were

• Godot Jam #3
• PyGame Jam #1
• Micro Jam #34

But this was my first game jam where I had to make a game solo. In the past, my friend also participated with me in these jams and helped me by creating assets for the game, but this time, I had to make assets and a game for the jam alone.

When you’ve only got 48 hours, rule #1 is... DON’T WASTE TIME.
Guess what I did?

• Spent hours overthinking which engine to use (Godot or Mini Micro)
• Watched a random 3-hour livestream.
• Procrastinated on game idea.

By the time reality slapped me, it was already end of Day 1, and I had literally... NOTHING.

So that's the actions resulting to panic mode on Day 2.

Day 2 (Last Day)

With the clock ticking, I knew I had two options:

• Either give up and ghost the jam...
• OR, full speed run the game development process.

I pulled some inspiration from the same livestream that stole my Day 1 (ironic, I know) and cooked up the dumbest but somehow functional idea ever...

Meet Henry the Stickman, a fresh Hogwarts graduate who just found out from scientists that...

→ “Earth won’t be livable in 2 months.”

Henry does what any logical wizard would do — he flies to the moon to fix it. Except... he forgot his spellbook on Earth. And yeah, no fuel to go back.

He concludes to? Throw random magical items into a cauldron and pray it works.

This was a stupid idea, I knew it, but I didn't have any good idea at that time, so I decided to go with this one. I added 5 items into my game, which were kept on a table beside a cauldron. The player had to randomly pick 2 items out of these 5 and just hope that he was using the correct recipe.

These 5 items were as follows:

• Goo of Dragon
• Eye of Cat
• Hand of Zombie
• Hat of Witch
• Feather of Phoenix

In 5 hours, I implemented these features into my game:

• Dragging and Dropping the Items
• Drop Detection on the Cauldron
• Random Dialogues, Change of Earth's state after items were dropped
• Player Could Press the space key to check the current items inside the cauldron

Here is a screenshot of the game I made at the end:

This was probably the worst game jam submission I had made till now, and the reasons were:

• This was my first jam in which I was solo and time limit was of 48 Hours(I usually participate in 1 week jams)
• The wasted Day 1

But this game also had some good points

• I didn't vibe coded this game.

Usually, I had to rely heavily on AI for my submission, but this was the first submission where the use of AI was very low (Only on the random dialogues).

This was only possible because of the simplicity of Mini Micro. Even with very little experience with Mini Micro compared to Godot, I easily made this type of game in it under 5 hours.

• Learned more about time management, surviving pressure, and scoping tiny.

Result Day

I had expected that I would lose with a rank of 60 out of 75 entries, but actually, other developers liked my game.

Results that were better than expected

• Use of theme (Expected: 30-40)
• Controls (Expected: 50-65)
• Presentation (Expected: 60-75)

Results that were the same as expected

• Overall (Expected: 50-65)
• Enjoyment (Expected: 50-65)
• Concept (Expected: 50-65)

Results that were worse than expected

• Use of Prerequisite (Expected: 40-60)

Why?

I think other developers didn't understand how I interpreted the prerequisite

If Henry uses the wrong spell, Earth would be destroyed, and all humans on Earth would die. So, in short, Henry is playing with death

If I were in the place of other developers and I had to vote for my game, I think I would also vote the same as they did🤣

Outro

That's it for today, make sure to drop down your thoughts in the comment section. I would meet you in JamLog 2, till then stay awesome and goodbye.

If you’ve ever panic-coded a game like this, drop your wildest jam story in the comments. Let’s cry together. 😂