The GMTK Game Jam is still one of the busiest dates on the indie calendar, and the 2026 edition handed us a short, unforgiving theme: COUNT DOWN. We went in with two games instead of one, both written in LÖVE 2D: Emberfall and Silo 7. Two opposite readings of the same brief, and two very different learning grounds in the space of a few days.
A theme that deserved better than a stopwatch
The trap with COUNT DOWN is to drop a timer in a corner of the screen and call the job done. The number goes down, the player glances at it now and then, and the theme stays a decoration sitting on top of the game. We wanted the opposite: a countdown you read in the world rather than in the HUD.
The two projects answer that question from opposite directions. Emberfall drains the light itself, until the screen goes out around the player. Silo 7 accepts the visible clock but makes it physical: the ticking speeds up, the screen flashes red, and the ground shakes through the final five seconds.
Emberfall, where light is your ammunition
Emberfall is a top-down action roguelite where your light plays three roles at once: field of vision, ammunition and dash. A single resource, the Glow, feeds all of them. Every spell cast, every dodge, every second spent seeing clearly takes its cut from the same bar.
The sun is gone; all that remains is what the lantern can still hold. You descend three rooms of a drowned nave, and every action makes the world a little darker. Below 25% Glow, DARK mode kicks in: damage dealt and taken both move to 1.5×. The game becomes faster and more fragile at the same time, which produces exactly the kind of decision we were after — save your light, or accept hitting harder in the dark.
The theme then stacks across four layers. The opening cinematic literally counts 03, 02, 01 as the ember is pulled through the portal. The Glow bar drops with every action and the screen visibly darkens. Each room shows a counter of remaining enemies you have to bring to zero to unlock the exit. And if Glow bottoms out, a three-second window opens: find a light source, or the run ends there.
Content-wise, the progression fits into three hand-crafted rooms. The first teaches the melee dance against three bandits. The second adds a ranged acolyte and forces constant movement. The third crosses the fire and makes you spend light like water. On death, an end card sums up time, kills, damage and how much Glow it took to get there.
The rest is polish: three playable heroes with directional sprites, a lives system with in-room respawn and medkits, screen shake, hit stop, impact flashes, a full menu with audio settings, fullscreen, cursor and language options, plus English, French and Italian localisation auto-detected from the OS. The game ships as a standalone Windows .exe and as a cross-platform .love.
Silo 7, Boulder Dash under a nuclear coat of paint
Silo 7 starts from a far more classic base: Boulder Dash rules, dressed as a decommissioned nuclear silo. You are a scavenger locked inside a facility whose self-destruct sequence has just armed itself. You need to retrieve enough fuel cells to unlock the escape hatch before the counter hits zero. And above all, never stand under a boulder right after digging.
Five hand-crafted sectors raise the pressure by degrees: ORIENTATION acts as the tutorial with 90 seconds and eight cells, REACTOR introduces boulder traps, VENTILATION adds a central barrier, QUARANTINE doubles the trap layer, and CORE brings it all together in sixty seconds. The gap between available cells and required cells narrows at every level, which turns reading the terrain into a genuine routing decision.
The dressing was the fun part. The aesthetic is industrial airlock: menus on a bulkhead backdrop, cool-steel shaft interiors, an ambient drone. And the boulders are not boulders but monitor faces — a deliberate wink at the anti-AI rule of the jam. In Silo 7, quite literally, the AI is what falls on you.
Why LÖVE 2D holds up so well in a jam
Choosing the framework took very little thought. LÖVE 2D and Lua reload fast, demand no project scaffolding, and let you write a playable prototype in the first evening. Over such a short format, that iteration speed matters more than any advanced feature.
The most underrated point is distribution. A .love runs anywhere the runtime is installed, and packaging a standalone Windows executable is painless — the icon is injected with rcedit. Someone landing on your itch.io page should never have to install anything before trying the game, and that detail often decides how much feedback you get during the voting window.
If you want to start from the basics, we walked through a complete project with Cosmo Invaders, a Space Invaders built in Love2D.
The no-generative-AI rule, and what it actually changes
The 2026 edition bans generative assets, in the game and on the itch.io page alike. We followed the rule in full: no artwork, no audio and no page copy was produced with generative AI. Everything comes either from our own asset library built up over the years, or from third-party packs credited one by one — Luis Zuno’s sci-fi props and backdrops, Free Game Assets’ cyberpunk tiles, unTied Games’ explosions, Kenney’s Kenpixel font, Juhani Junkala’s retro sounds, and effects generated with bfxr.
That constraint has an interesting side effect: it forces you to design from what you already own, instead of commissioning an image that would fit the idea perfectly. Silo 7’s monitor faces came from exactly that. We wanted an obstacle that falls, we had monitor sprites inside a cyberpunk city pack, and the joke about the AI crashing down on the player came out of the constraint rather than a spec sheet. In a jam, a well-organised asset library is worth as much as a good engine.
What we take away from this edition
Making two games instead of one forces you to decide early. Emberfall needed one coherent resource system, Silo 7 needed readable levels and an honest curve; in both cases, anything that did not serve that promise directly got cut. That is probably the real lesson of a jam, far more than the technical side.
If you have never taken part, we wrote a piece explaining what a game jam is and another collecting our tips for making the most of one. Both still hold up, edition after edition.
Where to play and watch
Emberfall is available at itamde.itch.io/emberfall and Silo 7 at lythande.itch.io/silo-7. Both ship as standalone Windows executables, no prior install needed.
If you try either one, we would like to hear about it — especially on the DARK mode balance in Emberfall, which is the part we had the least time to tune.
0 Comments