51 Game Design Tips From 51 Game Jam Games

Jonas Tyroller sat through 51 game jam submissions and pulled a design lesson from every single one. The result is one of the densest eight-minute design breakdowns on YouTube, so here's the distilled hit list.

Feel & Polish

• A vignette and drop shadows on sprites cost almost nothing and make a surprising difference.
• Pixel art reads better when all pixels stay the same size, inconsistent pixel scale breaks the illusion instantly.
• Give sprites a simple squash-and-stretch bounce animation. Even one idle squiggle makes a character feel alive.
• Smooth out object movement. Snappy, eased motion reads as responsive; stiff linear motion reads as unfinished.
• Your blacks don't have to be black. Tinting dark tones with a hue, dark red, dark blue, gives a game a more intentional look.

A great colour scheme isn't fancy. It's just nice colours used consistently, complementary pairs like blue/orange or blue/yellow almost always work.

Game Systems

Design for interactions, not just actions:

• If enemies can pick up objects and throw them at you, and the hydraulic press can also crush enemies, the world feels authentic. Every object having physics consequences makes the game system feel alive.
• Make enemies fight each other. A battlefield where factions collide is more interesting than one where everything targets the player.
• Multi-purpose mechanics punch above their weight. Shooting used for both movement and combat. A single button that handles shooting, jumping, and running. One mechanic doing three jobs means the player is always engaged with it.
• Let mechanics synergise. Shooting downward to boost jump height is a small interaction that rewards experimentation.
• Objects merging into new ones, enemies exploding on collision, items carrying between levels, the more interactions exist, the more there is to explore.

Puzzle Design

Don't make puzzles hard by making them big. A good puzzle is small enough that you can hold all the information in your head at once.

• Grid-based layouts make it easy to give players clear feedback on state. Puzzles become readable.
• Moving all pieces in a row or column simultaneously is a constraint that opens interesting design space, limited moves, maximum consequence.
• Moving multiple objects at once with a fixed number of moves: simple premise, high ceiling.
• Indirect control, only being able to influence certain objects through other objects, is an underexplored challenge.

Tutorials & UX

• Be clear about what the player is supposed to do. Not patronising, clear.
• A tutorial that lets you make mistakes but tells you how to recover is better than one that prevents failure. Show the restart prompt; let the player work out the mechanic.
• Almost anything is better than a wall of text. Text on the side while the player experiments is a solid default.
• Don't explain. Let players try.

Juicy Extras Worth Stealing

• Health stored physically in the world instead of a UI bar, both more immersive and more readable.
• A character that controls differently based on a stat (slim vs. fat) with intuitive feel and two distinct fail states.
• Making the player create something beautiful as the core loop, satisfying even without challenge.
• Rising numbers are addictive. Clicker games proved it. Use progression systems freely.
• Abstract sounds can work. Don't default to literal.
• Background textures add production value with minimal effort.

The Game Jam Workflow That Works

Jonas's own approach during the jam: keep the game in a finished state at the end of every day. Day one, playable start to finish. Day two, new mechanics added, tutorial improved. Day three, polish and custom sound effects.

Always keeping it in a finished state means you never have to be afraid that you won't be able to finish.

No crunch panic. No half-built features. Ship a smaller thing that works, then expand it.