My First Game Jam

Having never released a game before, I decided to participate in Brackey's Game Jam 2026 to dip my toes into the game development space. The goal I set for myself was very easy, just submit something and learn along the way.

The Theme

The theme for this game jam was "Trust No One", and I won't lie, I had no idea what to make for this theme. This is where I came across the first challenge of developing a game, figuring out what to actually make. In Google docs I wrote down some ideas, all of them not great, but the one I settled on was creating a murder mystery game where all the NPCs are suspects and you have to figure out who the killer is using their answers, environmental clues and your brain. The idea is this ties into the theme because people will obviously lie to you or misremember details.

Getting Started

Stack

Because my personal game engine is no where near ready to make games with, and I have 0 experience using any other game engine, I decided to stick to what I know and use basic HTML/CSS/JS using HTML Canvas for rendering.

Architecture

Because this is just a small game jam game my architecture is simple, I have a class for entities, user inputs, a dialog system, level rendering and the main game file. For level rendering, I have an object that defines the levels with all of the houses, roads and NPCs, which is then passed to an instance of the level renderer on the start up of the game which will take that data and return all of the objects in the level. The level renderer also controls all of the calculations for deciding which NPC the player is talking to or which house they will enter based on how close they are to the house or NPC.

Main Idea

The main idea of the game is that you are a detective who is solving a murder and anyone could be the perpetrator. You have to explore the town, talk to the NPCs and search through different areas to gather evidence and make your decision on who you think did it using logic and deduction.

Failure

Given my hectic work schedule (currently I am working 7 days a week), I was not able to finish on time. I got the main structure of the game done, but did not have time to add any story elements or actual game play. From a technical perspective I am proud of this project as I think I did well on the architecture of the game, and it would be quite easy going forward to continue building it, however I was not able to submit anything for my first game jam and I am disappointed. We'll get 'em next time.