My experience with the 2026 GMTK Game Jam

A screenshot from the final game.

About a week ago I participated in the 2026 GMTK Game Jam with friends. Together we made the game MoneySink Inc.. It was a fun time and I thought I’d take the opportunity to write and showcase a bit of the experience.

We’ve worked together before on a couple game jams but this was the first time I was contributing as an artist. This was mostly because I was busier at the time of the jam and could not contribute that much time as a programmer and because the idea we came up with really suited my help as an artist. 

The theme this year was “Countdown”, and after some deliberation we came to the idea of a reverse incremental game, where you start with something akin to a late stage Cookie Clicker game and you have to dismantle your business before time runs out. You would have a tower with lots of little automated workers constantly generating money and you would have meetings with NPCs to guide the direction of your business. 

This left an obvious split in the art, our usual artist could focus on key art for the NPCs and I could focus on the floors and workers. It was late for me when we got to this stage so I let the others figure out the specifics. In the morning they came back with the general theming and requirements.

In the end we settled on four departments: Cloud Computing, Social Media, Water Supply Management, and Weather Control. I’m not sure how we ended up on a water themed business but it was funny so I digress. Each department would have two floors, one dedicated to human workers, and one dedicated to resources. Then it was on me to plan and populate these floors.

Because of the sheer quantity and relative lack of screen real estate being used, I decided to work at a smaller scale than ever before. I experimented with a couple scales but eventually landed on 6x6 as the sweet spot between readability, scale, and expressiveness. I made a quick turnaround for reference and started work. I decided that each floor would have three different “vignettes” of people working. After some tests I decided on a 12x12 space per vignette and for each of them to have a general idle animation and two special animations to mix in for spice, each eight frames long. I also picked a color palette I thought matched the aesthetic. I then wrote out prompts for each of the vignettes and following the graphic, they are as follows:

For the Cloud Compute floors: an AI programmer at a computer, a strategy meeting with a presenter and audience, a mechanic working on a robot, a sorting arm sorting items into boxes, a severs, and a set of filing cabinets.

For the Social Media floors: a streamer at a desk, an influencer with a tripod, a person taking selfies, a click farm, and a server. I was one short for this one because I couldn’t think of a third resource type.

For the Water Supply Management floor: a bottle making station, a bottle filling station, a bottle capping station, a recycling machine, a filtration system, and a cap making station.

For the Weather Control floor: a wizard influencing the weather, a guy holding an umbrella, a drone operator influencing cloud patterns, a spell book, lightning in a bottle, and drones in storage.

Then for each of the floors I had to design spaces for the vignettes.

I was working at a good pace but around halfway through the vignettes I decided to cut the special animations for time. I put the first batch in-game and figured some things out. The biggest takeaway was that I was focused in the wrong places. I was designing the floors to have 20ish people per floor but the demo was built to support around 500. We scaled it back a lot eventually, but still it was still too dense to tell apart different animations, let alone their extra animations. Not even to speak to the computation costs of having them each with an animation controller cycling individually. 

This was definitely a case of me focusing on the parts of the process that were most fun to me personally, rather than focusing my time on the most important aspects of the project before. This is a note I’ve given verbatim to artists I’ve worked with before so being on the other side was a new experience. It’s when I realized this that I pivoted to quantity over quality which was the right option. 

There are some exceptions. Notably I really wanted the Water Supply floor to be an assembly line and I spent a good hour or so animating it.

You can’t really see it in the final result but I’m still glad I did it. And that’s about all the work I did for the jam. I programmed a bit to help with implementation but my main focus was art. Overall it was a good time, I got to work in a new scale, this was my first time using a proper color palette in a while, and I got to have a good time working with friends. In the end, I think the game is fun enough, gameplay wise it was a lot harder to tune compared to previous projects. It’s definitely not our best but the point of game jams is to make something new, not to worry about it being your best.