In April of 2026, HelperWesley hosted the Fireside Jam 2026. I participated, submitting a game called Rosie's. Here is the story and where I want to go from here!
posted: May 10, 2026
updated: n/a
A game jam is an event in the game-making community where people, either alone or in groups, make games within a short time limit (typically a weekend). The host of the game jam will also give a theme that the games have to follow. The contestants will submit their games by the deadline, then the host and any judges for the jam will rank them on various criteria. The contestants also rate each other's games, but that is usually a separate rating. If the host is a youtuber, usually the top games will be in a youtube video. The Fireside Jam lasted 10 days, and the theme was "Manage".
When I saw the theme, I decided to go with an idea I'd had floating around in my head for a childcare simulator. I have experience in childcare, and the absurdity of that environment has always been really compelling to me. I decided that I wanted the player to have to manage following their boss's rules and caring for the kids at the same time. As time went on and they played through more days, they could attend "professional development courses". These would allow them to do both of those things more effectively and meet more of the children's needs in a day. I wanted a retro style, something that felt nostalgic. I wanted to design my childcare room with things I'd seen in the classrooms at my own jobs. I was completely inspired and super excited to make this.
Feel free to skip this bit if the coding / technical game making isn't of interest!
When I say I spent every free second on this game during those 10 days, I mean it. I had never seen a game all the way through before, and almost all these mechanics were new to me, so I knew I had to just put pedal to the metal on this one. On the first day, after I got the basic planning done, I threw together a really simple room and pulled in my player controller from another project (something this game jam allows). I got some simple systems done, such as time tracking and choosing a certain number of random children from a list to spawn. I also had to make placeholder models for the player, which I sized down and used for the kids, too. Over the next couple of days, I got the rest of the big systems in. This meant making the children spawn, making them have needs at random intervals, making ways for the player to meet their needs, making events that the player would have to deal with throughout the day, calculating what the player should get paid each day based on how well they did (and made this display on the "end of day" screen), and threw together some placeholder models for things like water and food. I also had to figure out how to make the children move around the room without navmesh. It wasn't working in my project, and I did not have time to troubleshoot it. And of course, all this came with a LOT of bugs to fix.
I got to move on to some stuff I was more familiar with at this point. I made menus with options the player could change to their liking, a credits menu, and a debug menu that was really mostly for me during development (though I did technically leave it in, just without telling anyone it existed :P). I made some basic music, figured out making the player's choices in the options menu save across plays, and made a boss to yell at the player if they took too long to do things. I made it so that nothing happened immediately; instead, you had to actually take time to do things. I also made "professional development" courses that the player could take to make things easier. These did things like make cleaning quicker. Then, it was into polish.
I originally intended to leave half of the time for polish because I knew that would be the part I struggled most with (given I've never done this part at all). My freelance work almost doubled in the week of the jam, so I ended up with 3.5 days to polish instead of 5. I did everything I could, and I think that given how little time I had, I did ok. I threw together models for the food and water, as well as a new model for the children with animations. I made classroom decorations. In addition, I made tutorials to help the player understand what they were meant to do.
This was a doozy. I went into this knowing that my end product would likely be a bit scuffed. This was my first game jam and my first time doing things like proper polish. As mentioned in the technical portion, my freelance work almost doubled during the jam period. I had not been expecting this, and while my original scope would have been reasonable if that hadn't happened, it did. Obviously, this isn't a bad thing, but it was incredibly disheartening to realize how much less time I would have and feel defeated before I was even halfway through. That said, I think with all this in mind, I am incredibly proud of how much I learned and how much I did manage to accomplish. I have a huge soft spot for this game concept, and knowing the potential makes me want to continue with it and see it through all the way.
This will be updated as soon as the video comes out and ratings are released!
As mentioned, I want to really see this game through. A lot of my code is absolutely unusable in a full-on game, so I will start from scratch and bring over what code I can. I will bring others onto the project with the skills to help me make this the best project it can be. I am excited to make this a collaborative effort and to bring this game to full fruition. It will be a journey for sure, but I do truly see potential in this game, and I think I can do it justice.