50 New Games From The Mystery Game Jam!
And more lessons I learned from my own experience
That’s right, we more than doubled the number of submissions from last year’s event!
A total of 535 people registered for the 2025 Mystery Game Jam, resulting in 54 valid entries submitted before the deadline.
There were also a considerable number of teams who either dropped out or otherwise missed the deadline, so this just goes to show both the popularity and the difficulty of mystery game development.
Thank you to all who participated, and congratulations to everyone for a job well done!
Lessons learned making my entry
Yes, I actually managed to submit something this year!
Last year I tried, but just couldn’t get anything close to ready by the deadline. But this year I managed to follow all of my own advice, and now I actually have something to show for it.
I can’t tell you how badly I’ve wanted to make a new mystery game, especially after everything I’ve learned about them over these past two years.
Although I do have a competitive spirit, this wasn’t really about the competition for me — it was about satisfying my creative urge to make something new, and also my desire to learn some valuable skills in the process.
Now, that said — this was still a difficult process. I didn’t come up with my idea until April 17th, didn’t start on it until April 19th, and couldn’t find the time to work on it again until April 26th. Then I suddenly got sick for three days, and then marathon’d the rest from May 1st up until May 5th.
So ultimately, I only had 7 days to actually make the game.
It’s not perfect — it’s probably pretty buggy if you mess with it too much — and if I’d had the full 2 weeks (or even the full 30 days) I could’ve done so much more with it. But that’s fine — the point is that I challenged myself to make something, and I hope that’s what you can take away from this experience as well.
Here’s a quick list of lessons I learned this year:
It’s easy to brainstorm ideas when you try to make your game fit two themes instead of just one — although I came up with my final idea differently.
I played to my strengths by focusing purely on a programming-oriented game, and I kept the scope small enough so that I could finish it by myself.
Don’t be afraid to learn new tools (like AI) to teach yourself new skills. For example, I had no idea how to use websockets 2 weeks ago, but now I’ve published a game that uses them. And I got it done faster than I could have by struggling alone.
Emergencies pop up when least expected, so just get as much done as you can before they happen. Learn to say no to things that aren’t truly important.
Don’t wait for someone to tell you to get to work — it’s time to make things happen now. The clock is always ticking, whether there’s a game jam or not. It’s up to you to make the most of your time.
And again, I just have to say to those of you who had to drop out or couldn’t submit in time: it’s okay, and it happens to the best of us. What matters is that — hopefully — you had a fun and memorable 30 days, and at the end of it you still produced something you can be proud of making.
Lessons learned hosting the jam
With 2025 being my second year hosting a game jam, I was able to learn from last year’s mistakes, and I intend to learn from them again next year.
Last year, I had announced the event one month before it started, and I noticed an exponential increase in registrations the closer the date arrived. So I thought, if I just announced the date 3 months in advance, maybe it would 3x our signups?
…Well, it turns out that’s exactly what happened!
So that clearly shows the importance of learning from past events.
Here’s what I took away from this hosting one:
We won’t host team-building events anymore because there’s simply no interest in them. Instead the Discord forums were extremely active for finding teams. I’m guessing it’s probably a lot easier to do that asynchronously and without the need to hop on a voice call.
We also won’t do the weekly Q&A sessions anymore for the same reason. I’m not so sure about why though, since people still tended to struggle with development, but it seems like Q&A calls just aren’t the right format for solving that problem.
The way itch allows creators to host jams has some room for improvement. For example, there’s an option to keep all submissions hidden until the deadline, but in order to submit your game, it has to be a public page, so that defeats the purpose. Also, your options for choosing who can vote on entries boils down to either everyone, or only people who submitted games — you can’t select people who registered for the jam, which to me seems like the ideal middle ground.
The number of spam submissions we received was a lot higher this year, possibly because our participation numbers were also way higher. Although the submission questions helped weed them out, I still wasted too much time trying to verify which games were real and which ones were fake. For example, a game might look legitimate until you dig around and discover its trailer on YouTube, noticing the upload date was 8 months ago. Disqualified! There were some other edge cases that I hadn’t encountered before, so I’ll need to come up with some new rules to streamline them next year. But overall, it was still easier than 2024.
Of course, my learning isn’t done just yet — we still need to actually play through all the games and then cast our votes!
Here’s a recent post that explains the voting criteria in detail.
The winners will be announced in this newsletter on May 26th.
Anyway, that’s all for now.
You can play all of the Mystery Game Jam 2025 submissions here!
Thanks for reading!
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