Game Jam Playbook
June 5, 2026
Overview
Do large-scale production methods survive a 48-hour deadline? Agile, Scrum, Stage-Gate and risk management assume projects that run for years. A game jam compresses concept, design, implementation and delivery into two days. This project asks which parts of the professional toolkit still hold at that scale, which ones do damage, and what replaces them.
The result is jam.akoto.dev, a playbook written for jam developers rather than academics. It holds one short entry per best practice and anti-pattern, plus a pre-jam checklist.
I produced it as my final thesis at the S4G School for Games between March and June 2026, roughly 200 hours of work.
How I Created the Thesis
Sources and Scope
I worked from two sources: the Ludum Dare post-mortem archive for individual cases, and Christer Kaitila's The Game Jam Survival Guide for the aggregated view. Global Game Jam survey data and AA studio post-mortems were on the list, and I cut both so the findings and the deliverable could reach the quality I wanted. A thesis about scope decisions had to make one.
Finding Format
Every finding follows the same pattern: what happened, in which case, what it shows. I read the post-mortems before the book on purpose, so the raw cases arrived without the book's categories framing them first. I then cross-checked each finding against the primary documents: the Scrum Guide, Stage-Gate and the Agile Manifesto.
Task and Time Planning
Nine weeks, planned in Linear with calendar blocks per phase: setup, four weeks of reading, findings, discussion, then the site. I also wrote a small style guide up front to keep the document consistent, and grouped every source and finding in a single structure before writing a word.
From vite to Hugo
The playbook started as a vite-based wiki. After feedback I migrated the whole structure to Hugo with the Hextra theme, which I already knew and which handles documentation better. Shortcodes and Hextra's callouts made the entries readable at a glance. Deployed on Cloudflare.
The Playbook
Jam participants do not read a thesis. So instead of a best-practice essay, every practice and anti-pattern became a short entry that fits on one screen, plus a pre-jam checklist covering what to verify before the clock starts. Written to the writethedocs.org guidelines.
Result
Large-scale methods do not transfer as systems, but the reasoning inside them does. Jam developers rebuild professional logic without ever naming it: “no art until the gameplay is fun” is a Stage-Gate checkpoint, “get it playable in the first hours” is Agile’s Done increment, scheduling tasks day by day is a sprint backlog.
A game jam is not a diluted production. It is a stress test of one. The deadline strips everything optional and leaves what was load-bearing from the start.