Hello, my name is Noah, and this is my post-mortem of my first game jam. Quick background on me: I’ve been an indie game dev since around 2019, starting out with Unity, and I’m currently a university student enrolled in Game Design. Recently, I started learning Unreal Engine 5, and I sometimes make YouTube videos about my non-profit games for fun.
Now, back to the game jam. The event was called "Mini Jam Gam #38", and it was a 2 1/2 day jam. So I immediately, I called up two of my friends/classmates, Jakob and Ethan, to join me on the project (though Ethan joined a bit later). The jam kicked off on a Friday morning, and Jakob and I found out the theme was "Theft" with a required special object: a hat. We started brainstorming immediately and, within about 30 minutes, landed on the idea of making a house robbery game. The game was simple: the player breaks into a house to steal items and hits a cash goal. The twist? You couldn’t hit the goal without stealing the “Fucci Hat” a rip-off of a Gucci hat we added for jokes.
Once we locked in the concept, we broke it all down into mechanics and tasks. Jakob got to work creating assets for the house, like furniture, while I tackled the core mechanics: picking up objects, opening doors, and (my least favorite) coding the AI. We used GitHub for revision control and Unreal Engine 5 to collaborate.
The AI was the real nightmare. It had to react to sounds, investigate the noise, search for a few seconds, and return to bed if it didn’t find anything. Sounds simple, right? Well, trust me, it wasn’t. I spent hours figuring it out, learning a ton of new systems along the way. Meanwhile, Jakob also spent hours knocking out tons of furniture assets, laptops, bookshelves, kitchen items, bathroom essentials, you name it. By the end of day one, we had the basics down: a functional AI (sort of), a “hold E to pick up items” system, a timer that ran from 5 AM to 6 AM, and some basic UI for the cash, objectives, and the timer.
The next morning, we both woke up early and unknowingly started working on the same thing, which was the house layout. We didn’t realize this until later that morning when we noticed we called each other and we were doing the same thing. After comparing layouts, we chose mine and moved forward (lesson learned: always communicate with your team lol). By early afternoon, I had the house layout finalized, walls, doors, windows, everything. That’s when it hit us... We only had until 4 PM the next day, and there was still a lot to do. Then came along our hero, Ethan, who we got to help decorate the house’s 15 areas (yeah I know, I regret making a high-class modern house). He jumped right in while I focused on improving the AI and fixing bugs across the project.
By the end of day two, we had made huge progress. The house was nearly fully decorated, Jakob had added UI for menus (main menu, pause screen, win/lose screens), and I even implemented a dialogue system to introduce players to the game with Ethan acting as the player's getaway driver, on a mission that they're employed to steal this hat.
The final day was crunch time. We woke up early, knowing the clock was ticking. I discovered the AI still wasn’t working right, and I also forgot it couldn’t interact with doors, and tweaking it to fix that broke other things. Panic set in as I burned hours trying to fix it. Meanwhile, Jakob and Ethan were sprinting to wrap up the decorations, polish the UI, and final details. With one hour left, the AI was still glitchy, so I had to accept defeat on fully fixing it. Instead, I built the project for release, ran a quick playtest, and uploaded the game to Itch.io with just 36 seconds to spare.
That final hour was one of the most stressful of my life. Making a game in under 2 days is pure chaos. But I learned a ton: how to push through long hours while staying (somewhat) sane, how to collaborate effectively on a team, and how to problem-solve under extreme pressure. Even with the stress, it was a great experience. We got amazing feedback from peers and walked away with valuable lessons.
Will I ever join a 2-day jam again? Probably not. But hey, it was fun… in a weird way.
Thank you for reading :)
Here's our game (I fixed the A.I after release):
https://xnoahb.itch.io/robbery-at-dawn