I’ll be honest. I was looking for any game jam to give me an excuse to abandon my last project. That’s how this started. Project number 2319, codenamed White Sock, built for the Brackeys Game Jam 2026.

The theme was “Strange Places.” Lucky for me, every game I build ends up in a strange place, so I just made what I wanted.

The Game Jam

I’ve always loved the feel of games like FATE and Champions of Norrath. Never actually finished either of them if I’m being real, but the vibe stuck with me. That dungeon crawling loot grind where every run might turn up something incredible. I wanted to build that.

For the jam I kept it simple. One dungeon world you could enter, one enemy to fight, a hub where you could sell your loot, heal at a fountain, and gear up before heading back in. A few difficulty settings that didn’t actually change the rewards. Solo dev, full-time job, spare time only. There just wasn’t enough content to keep it from feeling thin.

It placed 289 out of 1,431 entries. I think I can do better, but for a week of work? I’ll take it.

Fast Forward. The Identity Crisis.

A month into development and this game has been through more identity changes than I can count. Originally it was an over-the-shoulder action RPG. Not Dark Souls, even though that’s apparently the only thing people know how to compare when you have third-person combat and a dodge roll. I was really just going for old-school Fable. My pitch to myself was simple: FATE, but not top-down, with better combat.

The problem? The combat didn’t feel great. And I tried everything. Hitstop on every hit. Camera shake. Floating damage numbers. Particle effects on every swing. Hours of sound design in Audacity. I buttered those animations up with every trick I knew. Still felt off.

The Pivot. Megabonk Meets FATE.

Then I played more Megabonk. A lot more… In Megabonk, There are basically no animations for the player or the enemies. The game is pure movement, loot, and escalating chaos. And it’s one of the most addictive games I’ve played in years.

That plays directly to my strengths. No complex animation work. All the game feel comes from VFX, sound, and screen shake. Things I’m actually decent at. So the combat shifted to auto-attack. Weapons fight on their own. The player focuses on movement, positioning, and dodging.

But here’s where it splits from Megabonk. I don’t want a roguelike. No run-based builds that reset when you die. Your gear is your build. Every piece of equipment you find is a permanent upgrade that changes how you play. Think of it like Megabonk’s level-up choices, except they’re loot drops that you keep forever.

A chestplate called something akin to Peppermint Suspenders: slows enemies when they hit you. Or a Nutcracker Crown: A spectral Nutcracker head that snaps at the nearest enemy. By floor 10 your character is a walking lightshow of stacked gear effects, and you built that from random drops, not a skill tree.

What Actually Got Built

Behind the existential game design crisis, a lot of real work happened this month.

Three weapon types are in and working. A two-handed axe that spins in a circle around the player. Dual daggers that do rapid double strikes on the nearest target. A staff that launches fireballs that explode on impact. Each weapon is its own ScriptableObject with unique behavior, so adding new types is fast.

The Gluttonous Nutcracker is the first special enemy. He doesn’t attack. He just waddles into position and starts banging his drum, healing and buffing every enemy around him. You have to push through the pack to shut him down, or the fight just never ends. Modeled and textured in about 3 hours. The PSX art style keeps things moving fast.

Reward chests got a rarity reveal sequence. When you open one, it cycles through rarity tiers with escalating sounds, particle bursts, camera shake, and hitstop. Each tier hits harder than the last. When it keeps climbing past Rare, you hold your breath.

XP and gold orbs scatter from dead enemies and get magnetically pulled toward the player. Small detail but it completely changes how combat feels. You’re constantly running through the battlefield scooping up rewards.

Also built this month: a stat system with four allocatable stats and a spending UI, mana with passive regen, a town scroll that summons a tombstone portal home, runtime NavMesh baking for procedural dungeons, an 8-directional movement blend tree, and way too many hit sound experiments in Audacity that I eventually gave up on.

What’s Next

April is about making the dungeon feel like a real place. Enemy spawner portals that force you to push forward instead of running in circles. Gear abilities where every uncommon+ item can roll a special effect. More weapon types. More enemies. Breakable objects to smash between fights. And hopefully the first boss fight against Krampus.

Demo is targeting sometime around July or August. Full launch around October for Halloween. We’ll see if I can get there without changing the entire game’s identity three more times.

Thanks for reading. More next week.