Over the past week, I participated in the Brackeys Game Jam 2025.2. The theme was Risk it for the Biscuit.

Before the jam started, I wrote out small ideas for each of the themes people were voting for. Initially, I was thinking of a game like Ultimate Chicken Horse where you needed to navigate a cookie through a maze of hazards into a waiting mouth on the other end.

Once the theme was officially chosen, I started to write out general thoughts on how to approach the challenge. Even though the theme was more about taking risks for a reward, myself (and a lot of others) also included cookies and biscuits in the game as well.

After some writing, I landed on Ballionaire style game. Except that the pegs on the board are brittle and break over time. The better the upgrade, the more brittle the peg. This would create a balance of risk between going for the high score and just trying to hit the goal.

The title Cookie Flicker came to be pretty much right away. I was going to brainstorm name ideas and that was the first one. I think it's perfect.

Since the whole game was about navigating a cookie into a photo of my mouth, I felt like the rest of the game needed a similar quirky vibe. Most of the jam was spent taking pictures around the kitchen and editing them to suit the needs of the game. Some pictures work better than others, but I was definitely running low on it.

I also didn't have a proper green screen setup, but I found a pretty suitable substitute by just displaying a big green image on my monitors and taking pictures in front of that.

This is also my first official Godot game! I've spent the last year or so getting comfortable with the transition from Unity to Godot and overall I really like it. Shame that their .NET implementation isn't there yet for a web release, but hopefully soon!

Much of the code came together pretty smoothly. I reused a few libraries that I've translated from prior games. Thankfully, moving a lot of my Unity utility libraries to Godot .NET wasn't too tough.

Through the week, I didn't have more than a few hours a day to work on it, so the last day of the jam was a big one. I did my best to keep organized and maintain a to-do list and organize it by things I need, want, and would like implemented. I'm happy that almost all of it ended up in the game.

One of the last things I ended up doing was implementing the 15 upgrades that affect your score. I wish I had more time to create more interesting passive effects or interactions, but I can definitely work on things more post-jam once reviews and scoring is completed.

The game over screen was the last thing I did, but it was honestly super important to me. As the cookie bounces down, it gets splattered by all the toppings. Once eaten, I wanted the end screen to show all those cookies again. It was a very interesting challenge to navigate a temporary object into a limbo zone and move them across scenes without destroying them. I love the result though!

Ultimately, I'm very happy with how this game turned out. I think there is a lot of promise for more interesting mechanics and toppings to affect the board state. Right now things are pretty basic and the game isn't too tough to beat. But it's got a very fun aesthetic and I think there is a lot that can be done.

I hope you have fun with it! Looking forward to what reviewers have to say about it and hopefully I can work to improve it even more over the next few weeks.

Here are images from the notes I took while working on the game. I tend to still write things out by hand. It helps with my flow quite a bit.