I’m entering another game jam!

I have entered two game jams. I have finished zero games.

I’ve not completed a single working game project since high school when I was taking game design and development classes as extracurriculars. Game development has always been a passion of mine and at one point was my dream career. I really want to get back into it properly, even as a hobby.

That's the reason this post exists. I'm entering FarmJam 2026 Summer Madness, it runs for 31 days starting July 15th, and I'm going to write devlogs the whole way through. Partly because I want to. Mostly because I want the accountability, and because writing down what I'm doing tends to expose the moments where I'm not really doing it.

The two failures

Game Off 2021 was my first jam ever. I picked PhaserJS, assuming that my JavaScript background would make it an easy on-ramp. 

Between work, a move, and the general chaos of that month, I never got enough uninterrupted time to build momentum. Life won. That one I don't beat myself up about.

Game Off 2025 stings more. I used Godot for the first time, learning GDScript from scratch, and I got decently far. There was a game in there. Then I never submitted it.

I've spent some time being honest with myself about why, and the answer isn't "I ran out of time." It's that I tunnel-visioned on art. I sank days into sprites I wasn't equipped to make, because art gives constant visual gratification and doesn't require you to fight an unfamiliar language. It was the most comfortable possible way to fail.

What's different

Pre-made assets, no exceptions. 

I'm using Kenney's asset packs, farm tiles, characters, emote bubbles, UI, interface sounds. If something's missing, I'll edit a Kenney sprite rather than import a stranger's. Art is not a thing I'm doing this month. Art is a thing I already have.

That solves the problem I had last year.

Feature freeze on day 21. 

Not day 31. Ten days of bugfixing, polish, itch page, and GIFs. This feels absurd until you remember I've never submitted anything. It’s the best way to ensure regardless of completion I have something to show and keep myself away from scope creep.

The jam

FarmJam is hosted by Figerox Studios and started back in 2023 as a small 15-day event. It's now a 31-day jam that runs twice a year, with a community somewhere north of 1,500 people.

The requirements are refreshingly loose. Your game has to be farm-themed and include growable crops or raisable animals. It needs a day/night system or a season system. Beyond that: horror, sci-fi, cozy, survival, first-person, experimental, the host explicitly wants people to prove that farming games can be stranger than they usually are.

What I'm making

Every farming game has a general store. 

You walk in, you buy seeds or farm animals from someone, you sell your harvest to someone.

I want to be that someone.

You're the farmer and the shopkeeper. You raise the livestock, and you run the stall that sells them. The catch is that the stall has hours and the farm has hours and they overlap. Every minute you spend behind the counter is a minute your animals aren't fed. Every morning you spend on the farm is a customer who walked away.

Stock comes from a mail-order catalogue, you order young animals, they arrive days later, and you raise them into something worth selling. There's a bill due every five days that doesn't care how your week went.

Beyond that: there’s wildlife and more to be mindful of to ensure a successful day.

I have a design doc. I've cut more from it than I've kept, and cutting is the part I'm most proud of, no employees, no seasons, no crops-with-tilling-and-watering, no NPCs that walk anywhere. Every one of those was a good idea I talked myself out of, and I'll write about a few of them because the reasoning was more interesting than the features would have been. Some are stretch goals but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

How these logs are going to work

I'll post as I go. Not on a rigid schedule, because promising one everyday when I may have little to show is boring for everyone, I intend to post often and specifically at the moments where something breaks or something changes.

If the plan survives to day 12, I'll say so. If it doesn't, I'll say that too, because a devlog where everything goes fine isn't worth reading and probably isn't true.

July 15th. Thirty-one days. See you on the other side.

Wish me luck!