Game Jam: Lead Developer

A month-long competitive game jam. Five people: one artist, one designer, three developers. We shipped a complete playable game with three working levels and finished 17th out of 100+ entries. Play it on itch.io.

Role

Lead developer and team manager. I ran the daily standup, owned scope and timeline, and worked across the codebase alongside the other two developers.

What I worked on

• Source control workflow. Set up feature branching from day one, plus a nightly merge window so conflicts surfaced early. Three mid-jam scene-file conflicts cleared without breaking the main build.
• Core gameplay. Player controller, collision handling, scene flow.
• Code review. Reviewed every PR into main from the other two developers, plus pair-programmed the harder systems.
• Scope decisions. Originally planned four levels. In week three we cut one that wasn’t coming together in time so we could ship three polished ones instead of four half-finished ones.

What I took from it

• Coordination overhead on a 5-person team was higher than I expected. A meaningful share of the lead role is reading other people’s code under time pressure and giving fast, concrete feedback.
• Unity scene files merge poorly. The nightly merge window made the difference between conflicts we resolved in ten minutes and conflicts that would have cost a full day.
• Calling time on the fourth level was harder than building it, and probably the decision I’m most proud of.

Stack

Unity, C#, Git. Discord for synchronous work, Trello for tracking.