JOE PEADEN

Software Engineer · Game Developer

Global Game Jam 2026

What did I do, and why?

I’ve been working on a longer-term project for a while now, and it’s worth taking breaks and doing something smaller here and there. Also, a friend of mine was interested in working with me for GGJ, so why not! The theme was revealed as “Masks” - and we got to brainstorming. We agreed that we wanted to do something traditional and simple for the basic mechanics and focus on experimenting with just one mechanic to fit the theme. We eventually decided to make a top-down shooter mech game that uses UI masks to block player LOS - and when they switch “masks”, their LOS would change. So the game would be about managing the player’s line of sight.

Lessons learned

  • Get more explicit when agreeing on what we want out of a project. My teammate and I are friends, but we haven’t really worked on something together in a long time. So when we started GGJ, we discussed what we wanted to get out of it to make sure we were on the same page. However, it became evident over the week that we had slightly different expectations, and this caused a bit of tension. Fortunately, we were able to clear this up towards the end and finished off strong. So, it’s important to really be through to understand each team member’s intentions for a project.
  • Focus on the essential features. While we had a playable game by the second day, we really didn’t have our core unique feature ironed out until about the 5th day. This meant we didn’t have much time to iterate on that. I think perhaps I got distracted implementing stuff I thought would be cool, rather than stuff the game needed. This meant that if the core idea didn’t work, we couldn’t really pivot. Lesson learned - get those absolutely essential features DONE!