Bigmode Game Jam 2025 Postmortem -- Power Napping

I'm writing and posting this pretty late but YAAAAYY!!!! I have successfully completed the Bigmode 2025 Game Jam!!! Yippeee!!!!

This was technically my third game jam (first one was back in college and I didn't do anything for it, and second one was GBJam 12 that was 4 months ago). Throughout this game jam, I was constantly and actively keeping my expectations low/nonexistent. I have been a dunkey fan for most of my life now, ever since his League of Legends days, and I have been a lurker in the Bigmode community (when Animal Well came out, I no-lifed it for several weeks haha). Thus, I felt like I was dipping my toes into the big leagues by being a part of this game jam. While I didn't participate in Bigmode's previous game jam back in 2023, I played a bunch of the submissions. There were so many good games with polish and creativity that I felt kind of daunted and like an imposter participating in this jam. Nonetheless, I persevered and here I am writing about my experiences, results, and feelings.

How the 10-day-long jam went

I felt like a mess throughout the jam haha 😅. It's very important to plan thoroughly and effectively, so the weight of the planning phase kind of got to me. I couldn't decide what to make! I had so many ideas that I was stunlocked and couldn't choose! Even when I eventually chose one idea, I would work a little on it and then go, "Dang, what I want to implement for this idea is too complicated for someone who is also learning Godot for the first time. Time to switch!" and then change ideas. In fact, I didn't even start working on Power Napping until that Friday, meaning I only had 3 days total to finish and submit!

The making of Power Napping

And so, the pressure was on. First I planned how the gameplay would go. Since game jam games should be short and played for 10 minutes average, I wanted gameplay to be simple. Even better if the gameplay was "stupid", because I felt that games with silly premises and "stupid" execution kind of fit my personality (and my friends' liking 😆). I drew from my own personal experiences of trying to take naps at my old job-- having to immediately wake up from power naps and appear awake when coworkers walked by. So the core gameplay was simple: sleep as much as you can but wake up if a coworker walks by. However, that being the only gameplay felt boring. I wanted a definite win-condition for a workday, so I added a document-quota mechanic where you had to type up specific amounts of documents for each workday. With that, I tied in an energy mechanic to further tie in the theme of the jam, "Power." Thus, sleeping would serve a purpose-- to generate energy to spend on typing documents. 

I locked in, watched a bunch of high-level Godot tutorials (e.g. GD Script overview, Godot state machines, Godot animation basics, etc.) while taking plenty of notes, and a day later I had a working prototype to send to friends to play test. They played it and while the whole idea was pretty funny, there was a problem-- the game was still pretty boring. There was no story, there was not much point in sleeping after you hit your quota, and the quota ramp as you progress through workdays eventually became impossible to meet. Thus, I thought of something that I've always wanted to try making-- a gacha game.

Gacha games have mechanics like gachapon machines (those Japanese capsule ball machines where you insert tokens, turn the knob, and a little capsule falls out with a toy)-- basically they have like lootbox mechanics where you can spend some sort of currency (free in-game currency, or real life $$$) to get a lootbox that contains whatever featured item (usually a character) for the game.

By adding a gacha mechanic, I was able to check a bunch of boxes:

• story-- the main character now has a reason for why he has to keep taking power naps at work. It's because he spends all night playing gacha games! (bonus points for being relatable to my friends and I)
• gameplay-- now there was a reason to sleep more. If you sleep more, then you have more energy at night to grind gacha games!
• collectables and meta progression-- collect stuff through the gacha to satisfy your collector cravings! And in addition, as you collect more gacha characters, the main gameplay of power napping at the office becomes easier! (Because you get permanent buffs by rolling on the gacha in the game)

I worked tirelessly through the night and by Sunday morning (12 hours before the deadline) I had pretty much the completed prototype of Power Napping. My friends loved it, which was the smallest goal I wanted to achieve: someone enjoying the 10 minutes that they spend on Power Napping.

Regarding the Results of the Game Jam

While I was keeping my expectations low, I couldn't help but feel a lot of excitement when I checked how the game was doing when I woke up the morning after the game jam submission deadline. Power Napping was the 8th most rated game at the time. There were thousands of participants and over 800 entries. How Power Napping was doing was amazing! In terms of popularity, that is. By the end of the voting period, Power Napping ended up being the 5th most rated game of the jam. I am very happy with that. However, ratings-wise it did good-- #94 in Fun with avg. 3.72 stars, #102 in Theme with avg. 3.96, #111 in Originality with avg. 3.99, and #226 in Presentation with avg. 3.60. I know I made a decent, stupid little game, but good isn't great and the game needed to be great if it were to make my dream come true: having dunkey play my game. While I was a little disappointed (I shouldn't be! The results were objectively good! Just not as great as I wanted...), in the end I am satisfied with the outcome of the game jam.

How I could improve next time

Actually just one thing: planning. I was stun-locked for a majority of the jam on what idea to implement. This indecisiveness led me to starting very late, so I didn't have enough time to implement a lot of quality of life features that several comments mentioned.

The future of Power Napping

If I gather the motivation to continue working on Power Napping, there are several things I would add. Some quality of life improvements would be a gacha summoning animation so you could see what units you got as you pulled on the gacha banners. Also more gacha units because I like more collectibles. And some more coworker design variety. Some gameplay mechanics I would want to add would be things like your neighbor also slacking so they could give a warning if a threat is coming. Also a mechanic where if you type certain legitimate words then you complete documents faster. And then another mechanic where sometimes coworkers could try to talk to you and you would have to shoo them away. All in all, there are a lot of things I can think of adding. When will I add them? Who knows. Maybe soon, maybe never.

I am working on another game... I think everything here in Power Napping could work well as a minigame in that other game... 🤔