Table of contents
- 32,000 game designers created 7,600 games in 4 days, showcasing incredible creativity and breaking records!
- Picture Perfect is a cozy game that turns a road trip into a beautiful playable poem.
- Need for Knead is a wild pizza-making game where your base grows from mushrooms to entire planets, making you frantically zip your mouse around to keep up!
- Building complex solutions in games is all about scaling up and keeping things tidy.
- Fractorio: The mind-blowing, fractal version of Factorio that's impossible to put down!
32,000 game designers created 7,600 games in 4 days, showcasing incredible creativity and breaking records!
Last month, I invited 32,000 game designers to make games in just four days. What's more, those games had to fit a theme - "Built to Scale". I wanted people to make games about teeny tiny things like mould and ants, and absolutely massive things like giants and planets. Additionally, I encouraged games about changing size - games about growing, shrinking, squeezing, and scaling. As always, the incredible GMTK community did not disappoint! You put together a whopping 7,600 games, making it another record-breaking jam for both GMTK and Itch.io.
Just like every year, I got people to rate and rank all of the games, leaving me with the top 100 games to play. And boy, there were some incredible titles in here - beautiful, imaginative, creative, and just plain fun games. But, I have to be picky. So these are the 20 that really stood out to me - 20 super smart games about size, scale, and dimensions. Let's take a look.
Conventional design wisdom suggests that you shouldn't use a full-on physics system to drive your platforming character - or else you'll end up with something floaty and finicky, like LittleBigPlanet. But then there's Little Slime Blows Up. Here, the devs lean into the float and the finickiness. This soft-body speedrunner is about a tiny blob of slime who can suddenly expand to double size with a hit of the space bar. This motion launches you off the ground, making for a springy, bouncy jump that is surprisingly fun to finagle. Then, you realize you can also use your expanding body to shunt other objects around. It becomes clear that you can jump up into small crevices, expand, and get stuck in the gap - useful for bypassing some of the game's most clever levels. Bringing to mind Jelly Car and the PSP's Loco Roco games, Little Slime Blows Up is a cute and fun physics obstacle course.
We always see a few grid-based puzzlers in the jam, so let me pick two of my favorites from 2024. First up is Nested. This is a really clever game about Russian nesting dolls. In each level, we start as a big pink doll. But hit a button and the top will pop off, revealing another, smaller doll inside. You can now move that one around independently - perhaps go off and hit a button, go through a color-coded door, get back in the pink doll's belly, or hit the button again to reveal an even smaller doll inside that one. This nested, fractal design sets up a number of simple conundrums about getting the right doll to the right spot, and sometimes having the right combination of colors in the same doll. There's nothing too taxing here, but you could imagine this game being expanded to contain some real head-scratchers. Lovely stuff.
The other grid-driven puzzle game I want to point out is Get Some Helium. We have this red balloon dude, and we can use the pump to increase his size until he's big enough to sit across these checkmarks. Later levels will teach you that the balloon won't expand if there are level tiles in the way, so you can use this knowledge to limit your expansion. Until that bites you in the butt, of course. Time for a rethink! More ideas are introduced in each stage, like blocks that must not be covered up if you want to win. There are new rules - like, what happens when you hit more than one pump at the same time? And later, you'll have an entirely new character to work with. Thanks to some smart puzzle solutions, a generous undo feature, and overall sharp presentation, Get Some Helium is well worth a go.
Next on the docket is Picture Perfect. This is a cozy game about forced perspective - that fun optical illusion where you place one object close to the camera and another far away, in order to radically swap their sizes. By fiddling with the zoom, the camera position, the pose, and the height, we can make someone pinch the Washington monument or fit inside the Gateway Arch. It's a fun little challenge, made twenty times better thanks to some gorgeous illustrations. And then you hit the final scene and realize that this wasn't just a random...
Picture Perfect is a cozy game that turns a road trip into a beautiful playable poem.
Get Some Helium offers an entirely new character to work with. Thanks to some smart puzzle solutions, a generous undo feature, and overall sharp presentation, it is well worth a go.
Next on the docket is Picture Perfect. This is a cozy game about forced perspective. You know - that fun optical illusion where you place one object close to the camera and another far away, in order to radically swap their sizes. By fiddling with the zoom, the camera position, the pose, and the height, we can make someone pinch the Washington monument or fit inside the Gateway Arch. It's a fun little challenge, made twenty times better thanks to some gorgeous illustrations. Then you hit the final scene and realize that this wasn't just a random collection of images - it was a road trip. A father and daughter traveling across America as she leaves for college. And that's just incredibly sweet. Picture Perfect takes the vibe of cozy narrative games like Florence and Venba, and crushes them down into a beautiful playable poem.
Now, speaking of photography, here's Shutterbug. This is a game about snapping photos of the insects in a grove by using your browser window as your viewfinder. You can move the window around to survey the scene and resize the window to make the shot smaller or swap between portrait, landscape, and square framing. To challenge you, the game gives you a number of simple missions: like take a photo of a bee but without getting a butterfly in the shot, or take a landscape shot of a dragonfly and a spider. It's a simple game, but it's a good time and a very clever use of your browser window.
Speaking of which, there were so many games about resizing windows in this jam. Like, so so many. Yes, you're all very clever! But let me pick my favorite: Windowframe. In this one, the game takes place in a number of different windows, including some that you can resize. So maybe we can stretch out this frame in order to reach the flag or inch this window around a big red obstacle. Then we hit windows that actually scale the objects inside, so we can use this window to shrink down and squeeze through this tight gap. Later, we get moveable windows, clever levels about searching for the goal, windows that move alongside their contents, and more. Nothing will give you trouble, and - I'll be honest - without the floating window gimmick, it wouldn't be noteworthy. But the simple design, easy controls, and clever concept still make it a standout game in this jam.
I wasn't surprised to see games inspired by Katamari Damacy in this jam. But I was taken aback by Sucky Safari. This game, about a cute vacuum cleaner on wheels, follows that idea of taking on mass in order to grow bigger so you can envelop even larger objects. But this time there's a twist. You see, you can easily suck up tiny animals like frogs, but larger critters like geese will resist your pull unless they're stunned. So what do you do? Well, you spit those frogs at the geese to wear them down so you can safely suck them up. What on earth am I saying right now? This is madness. Uh, anyway - when you've got enough stuff in your belly, you can choose to swallow some critters and grow in size. Now you're using ducks to pelt penguins and penguins to knock out rabbits. Oh - but watch out! Angry animals can damage your character, so you can't be complacent. Watch that health bar! This is, as you can hopefully tell, a dreadfully silly game. But it also puts a tactical spin on Katamari that turns that game into something new and fresh. And that was a really nice surprise.
It's Pizza Time!, which means we gotta play Need for Knead. This one is about rolling out a pizza base in different directions in order to catch falling ingredients. It's just that the ingredients become bigger, the bigger your base - from mushrooms and olives to, well, fridges, PCs, cars, biplanes, skyscrapers, asteroids, and entire planets. This game has no chill. Zero chill. It is chill-free. The scale expands so fast it's utterly comical. And to keep up, you'll have to frantically zip your mouse.
Need for Knead is a wild pizza-making game where your base grows from mushrooms to entire planets, making you frantically zip your mouse around to keep up!
The game puts a tactical spin on Katamari, turning it into something new and fresh, which was a really nice surprise. It's Pizza Time! This means we have to play Need for Knead. This game involves rolling out a pizza base in different directions to catch falling ingredients. The ingredients become bigger as your base grows, ranging from mushrooms and olives to fridges, PCs, cars, biplanes, skyscrapers, asteroids, and entire planets. This game has no chill—zero chill. It is chill-free. The scale expands so fast it's utterly comical. To keep up, you'll have to frantically zip your mouse around the desk, practically burrowing a hole into your mouse mat. Always remember that you only have a couple of minutes to grab someone's attention during a jam, so make them smile, make them laugh, and make your game so frenetic that there's no chance to even think about stopping until the game is over.
Next up: PlankTown. This game is about building a plankton village on the back of a mechanized walking robot. The village includes saw blades, cannons, and nuclear missiles to protect your plankton people from the local crab population. It's a Vampire Survivors-like game where you automatically attack nearby enemies, leaving you free to waltz around the map and pick upgrades. In this case, upgrades are literally building blocks that can be placed on your village. While the game is pretty generous about letting you stick stuff anywhere you like, including entire houses at a 90-degree angle, you will sometimes have to stop and rebuild to make everything fit. This happens a lot because this game doesn't care about balance. It's not about picking one thing and shoving it on your building—it's about taking all of them and hoping they fit! Within a few minutes, you'll have a towering, lumbering, weaponized shanty town blitzing crabs to pieces, hitting them so hard they fly off the screen and the world. It's fun, frantic, and a good lesson about game jam games: don't worry about making it fair on the enemy; just give the player a good time.
Alright, let me show you My Shadows Are Bright. This game is about a valiant knight clambering over castle ramparts to reach a goal. Well, that's the dream at least. It's actually just some blocks, action figures, and other toys placed in front of a torch, creating a silhouette on the back wall. You can then swap perspective into the imagination of a child to see those familiar objects interpreted as towers, spikes, and castles. This means you must flip back and forth between the two worlds, rearranging the objects to make a pathway to the goal. The scale bit comes from the fact that as objects get closer to the light source, their shadows get bigger, taking up more space in the dream world. So you'll need to think carefully about the object's position in both the X and Z axes. My Shadows Are Bright is short but sweet and shows a lot of potential to explore even more ideas with this silhouette gameplay. Check it out.
We saw a lot of games about game development—games about making games. It's all very meta. My favorite, though, was Blueprint Hell. If you've ever spent some time with Unreal's visual scripting system or Unity's shader graph, then this game will give you 'nam-style flashbacks. It's all about hooking nodes up to other nodes with stringy colored connections. Level one is nice and easy, but each level adds more stuff to think about—more nodes, more connections, more inputs, and more outputs. Because each level builds on top of your previous solution, you'll need to think ahead and keep things tidy. You'll need to make sure your solution is built to scale. Now, I do wish the game added an extra twist or idea—maybe certain connections that can't be crossed over or bits of the graph that you can't build on. But still, as a veteran of the animator graph war, it felt good to have a blueprint.
Building complex solutions in games is all about scaling up and keeping things tidy.
Level one is nice and easy. But each level just adds more stuff to think about—more nodes, more connections, more inputs, and more outputs. Because each level builds on top of your previous solution, you'll need to think ahead and keep things tidy. You'll need to make sure your solution is, well, built to scale. Now, I do wish the game added an extra twist or idea. Maybe certain connections that can't be crossed over, or bits of the graph that you can't build on. But still, as a veteran of the animator graph war, it felt good to have a blueprint that I could definitively defeat.
Okay, I didn't really think that someone could make Tears of the Kingdom in 4 days, but here we are. This is Tinker Co. This is a game about building your perfect vehicle to drive through a mine. So slap on some wheels, a drill, and a hopper. And it just works! You can now drive your madcap machine around the mine. And you can add more—giant wheels that let you bounce, more body parts, more drills! Go nuts. The physics system can handle it! Almost... It's a smart idea, and it's achieved really well. It would be a pretty standard game if it was just about mining for ore, but the creative twist of letting you make your own machine really adds something extra. I had a good time with this one.
Okay, it's kind of a meme that people make puzzle platformers for GMTK Game Jam. And this year was no exception. In the top 100 alone, there were about 20 games about moving a little guy around a world, pushing boxes, pressing buttons, and solving puzzles. So this year, I'm being mean. I'm being ruthless. I'm picking one puzzle platformer. And that one is Getting Goopy. This game is about a bouncy green blob who can pick up slime to grow or shoot out slime to shrink. And thus begins a handful of really nice little puzzles. Perhaps using the recoil of shooting slime to jump higher, or shooting your blobs through a tiny gap and then getting them back later. New ideas are quickly introduced, like walls that you can only walk through when you have no slime, and buttons that have to be held down by slime in order to work. It all feels great—it's nippy and bouncy, without ever feeling slippery. It has quick transitions and an instant restart. And it's got genuinely brilliant puzzles with those all-important "aha moments." Basically, you know that thing where you've been working on a game for 3 years and then you play a game made in 4 days and it's just... better? Don't you hate it when that happens? Uh... asking for a friend. Of course.
Okay, I love this one. It's called Grow to Perfection. So it's a game about guiding ants around a tiny nest to gather resources and bring them back to an egg. Once they've got enough, the egg hatches—revealing an even bigger ant. The camera zooms out, revealing another, larger area. So you do it again—there's now more resources, a new mechanic about combining raw materials to craft better stuff, and a new egg to hatch. And so on. But here's the thing: at any point, you can zoom back into a lower level. Perhaps improve the speed and efficiency of those previous ants, so you have more workers to use in the upper level. Wait—this is basically Factorio, but fractal. This is Fractorio! And it's blowing my mind. It's just so satisfying to scroll that mouse wheel back and forth as you burrow into the Earth and then pop back out to the planet's surface. Seeing all the levels working efficiently feels great. I ended up playing this for twice as long as any other game on the list, which is a high compliment to give when you have 100 games to get through. Give it a go.
Probably the best dragon-based postage game in the jam: it's Scale Mail. So this is a game about packing objects into the tight confines of a bag, by carefully placing and...
Fractorio: The mind-blowing, fractal version of Factorio that's impossible to put down!
To use in the upper level. Wait - this is basically Factorio, but fractal. This is Fractorio! And it's blowing my mind. It's just so satisfying to scroll that mouse wheel back and forth as you burrow into the Earth and then pop back out to the planet's surface. Seeing all the levels working efficiently feels great. I ended up playing this for twice as long as any other game on the list, which is a high compliment to give when you have 100 games to get through. Give it a go.
Probably the best dragon-based postage game in the jam: it's Scale Mail. This is a game about packing objects into the tight confines of a bag, by carefully placing and rotating the objects on a grid. But if you have too much stuff you can simply hit S to shrink the object down and make it fit. Sounds easy, right? Well, notice that shrinking an object also makes it heavier - so other objects need to be scaled up to keep everything under the target weight. You also have to deal with multiple bags and multiple characters, just to keep you on your toes. The game also has a clever scoring system. You just need to pack the items into the bag to win, but you can get more points by adding in complimentary candies. They also fill out the grid and impact the weight, so you'll need to think carefully in order to win all three stars. This game's cute art style, creative central mechanic, and smart scoring system make it a real winner in my book.
Let's get artistic, with Nearest Neighbor. The set-up behind this game is delightfully silly. Aliens have invaded the planet and demand to see our greatest artwork. The only catch: the aliens are practically microscopic. So your job is to recreate these great works of art on a much smaller canvas. That means recreating shapes, colours, and compositions on a weeny pixel grid. Which, for anyone who's done a little pixel art, is a fun challenge. You'll get the idea behind the game pretty quickly - but it's surprisingly relaxing to turn these masterpieces into microscopic versions.
This jam saw a number of games about the growing nature of plants and flowers. But my pick of the bunch, so to speak, was Through the Great Vine. This is a game about a giant thistle that grows towards a ball of concentrated sunshine. You can use this to snake the plant through gaps and crevices, and lead it to the beehive goal. But you also need to think about water. The plant drinks water as it grows, and if the water source runs dry the vine will stop and wilt. So you'll also need to think about how to redirect drops of liquid to your roots - how can you use your body as a slope, barrier, or path? More mechanics are introduced later, like multiple paths and spheres that make plants retract, instead of grow. And while the World of Goo inspirations are clear to see, this game still feels like its own thing. It's very impressive and well worth playing through the 10 levels on display.
While the theme of a GMTK Game Jam is intended to challenge you to make a game within a certain limitation or rule, it's always totally fine for people to interpret the words of the theme in whatever way they like. So how about taking the word "scale" to mean the scales on a fish? That's the idea behind Scale the Depths. This is one of those addictive feedback loop games - this time about fishing in the ocean. So we send a little hook into the depths, hunt for fish, and then bring them back to the boat. Next, we need to scale the fish in a cute mini game about speed, precision, and accuracy. Go too fast and you'll damage the fish, reducing its value. Then, we feed the fish to a hungry animal in order to earn some cash. And then finally, use that cash to buy upgrades so we can fish for longer, go deeper, and grab fish more easily. Loop, repeat, do it again. It's a winning formula, and it's done to perfection here. Not much more to say - just give it a go!
Another interpretation of the theme was taking the word scale to refer to climbing up towers. Like our next game: Blueprint Bob. In each level we have a handful of blocky building parts. And we must place them down to construct a tower. Hit play and all the blocks turn into heavy physics objects. And hero Bob goes from architect to acrobat as he tries to clamber up to the top of the pile - and stand on a point higher than the goal line. Simple but cute, effective, and a smart use of the theme.
There's always one team that goes a bit extra during the jam. And this year, that award goes to Pizzascaper. Yes - these crazy cats made Neon White in four days. A fast paced, neon-lit, score-chasing arcade platformer. In this one you can shoot out blocks into the environment, and then hit the right mouse button to scale them up - making bridges and platforms to help you get around the level. But soon enough you'll realise that there's a better way. Because if you stand on a block while it expands, it shoots you into the air and gives you a massive amount of momentum. And so it becomes a whole new game: creating trampolines to bounce you across the stage. And so sure - it's pretty similar to the explosive card in Neon White. But the infinite usage allows for some really fun speedrun strats. This game just flows, and it feels exceptional to fly through the level. It's tough, but really rewarding.
And there we go! By playing with size and scale, these designers came up with some truly innovative ideas. Games where players have to decide when to go big, and when to go small. Games about the chaotic thrills of constantly getting bigger. Games about scaling in power. Games about playing in multiple scales. And games about scaling the very confines of the game window.
Now: time for some honourable mentions, I reckon! Cappy & Tappy is a co-op game where one player's plopping down Tetris blocks, and the other is climbing up a gigantic tower. The Boiler Room is a brilliant squished-down Pikmin game about collecting leaves and shovelling coal. Train Set GO! is a nested metro manager that's split between a toy train and a tube map. Benedict Beaver the Builder is all about munching on logs to fill out a blueprint. And Shrink is all about a psychotherapist who literally leaps into their patient's mind. But there were just so many great games! What you lot can achieve in just 96 hours blows my mind. And I played even more amazing games on stream - now on the brand new Youtube channel GMTK Live. A huge thank you to everyone who took part, and those who played and rated the games. Thanks to itch.io for hosting the jam, to my Discord mods for keeping everyone chill, and to my Patrons for letting us run GMTK Game Jam, year after year, without corporate sponsors. You can now register your interest for 2025's jam, so you'll get an email as soon as next year's date is announced! But until then, thanks for watching - and I'll see you soon.