Developer's Quest:

A deck-builder roguelike about trying to meet a deadline for a game jam! Made for the GMTK 2026 game jam.

Race Against the Clock!

Starting with 24 HP (Hour Points) you must face off against a procedurally generated gauntlet of 4 enemies and a boss. After each turn, time will continue onward, reducing both your own and your enemy's HP (Hour Points).  

Become a Deck-Developer!

Choose cards wisely to buy yourself time while vanquishing the obstacles in your way!

Features

• 16 unique card types
• Tightly balanced, difficult foes with randomized behavior
• 5 classes of enemies (Art, Design, Writing, Music, Code!)
• Adorable art of monkeys making pull requests!

Controls: 

Mouse Left click is all you need.

Our Team:

Rishit Khare: Programming, Design, UI, Animations, Sound Design, and the one singular sprite of the enemy 
ghostrenderer: Art, Design 
simonswu23: Design, Programming, Balancing
Elliott: Music

After Notes:

Unfortunately this game jam was not well-timed for the team (ghostrenderer was moving, Elliott was on a construction site, etc.) but if you're curious about what we had in plan and had to scrap, or just wanted to know more about our design process, feel free to read more here!

We wanted to do a meta-idea where the game is about making a game for a game jam in time for the deadline. We thought a potentially good way to represent this was with a deck-builder game, where you collect cards representing skills or things necessary for the game to be a good game. The end goal of the game is to build a good set of cards to represent a well-rounded game that can pass a game review's expectations!

We had plans to make cards that got stronger with time (Practice Makes Perfect originally was intended to add the turn number to each attack instead of a flat buff), and we also had originally wanted to implement a mechanic where the player could choose to sacrifice hour points to play more cards if they ran out of energy. We also wanted to add more nice quality of life features, like being able to see the enemy intentions, and also being able to see the descriptions of buffs and de-buffs, but unfortunately we weren't able to get to it.

Additionally, the enemies were meant to be designed after tasks necessary to complete during a game jam! We were able to come up with different classes of enemies (art, writing, design, etc.) but unfortunately did not get to creating dedicated enemy art for each class. Additionally, the final boss was meant to be designed after a "game review."  We weren't able to flesh out the enemy mechanics as well as we'd like, and didn't get to spend more time play-testing and adjusting for balance, but we hope it was a fun experience to play our game regardless!