Showcase · strategy
Game Dev Game
Race the clock in a chaotic indie game jam. Build features, squash runaway bugs, manage energy and your buddy’s morale, post devlogs, and outscore rival jammers before the deadline hits.
Controls: Controls are shown inside the game. Click the game screen once to give it keyboard focus.
The Game Dev Game prompt
This is the exact prompt from the game’s package, word for word. Copy it, paste it into Manus and change any line to make the game your own.
Make a chaotic indie game-jam management game: race a ticking deadline while you and your overworked buddy turn a half-formed idea into a shippable hit, juggling features, runaway bugs, energy, morale, devlogs, and rival jammers in a frantic race to the finish. - **Core gameplay:** Start each jam with a compact game brief and a limited work schedule. Spend time and energy implementing features, refactoring, testing, polishing, or posting devlogs for visibility. Every feature can introduce bugs; chase bugs through a playful debugging interface before they multiply, crash builds, or damage your score. Balance your own energy with your buddy’s morale: rest, encourage, celebrate milestones, or push through at risky efficiency costs. - **Race and scoring:** Advance through clear jam phases—ideation, production, bug-fixing, polish, and final submission—while a large deadline clock relentlessly counts down. Rival jammers make visible progress and occasionally trigger competitive pressure. Score the final game on feature completeness, stability, polish, audience hype, team energy, and devlog engagement, with readable end-of-jam rankings and a memorable postmortem. - **Content and structure:** Provide a short, replayable campaign of varied jam briefs, random events, branching choices, feature cards, bug types, buddy reactions, and rival personalities. Include escalating difficulty, multiple endings, and a fast restart option so each run feels like a fresh improvised story. - **Controls and interaction:** Support mouse and keyboard as the primary controls, with clear clickable work actions, drag-and-drop bug triage, quick keyboard shortcuts, and gamepad navigation for all menus and core actions. Keep every system readable at a glance through compact dashboards, status meters, tooltips, and urgent visual warnings. Give it a proper indie-game feel with a consistent, original art style suited to a colorful desktop game studio, plus expressive character animation, satisfying particles, punchy screen shake, and reactive original sound and music. Include game-like title, pause, settings, accessibility, results, and restart UI; a short first-play controls tutorial; English UI and text; keyboard/mouse/gamepad desktop support; and landscape phone play. Use entirely original characters, art, music, and text, with no licensed IP. Self-playtest the complete loop, fix progression, input, balance, readability, and soft-lock issues, then provide a polished playable preview.
Make your own version
- Play it. Try Game Dev Game right here in the window. No downloads, no account.
- Copy the prompt. One click copies the whole prompt, with nothing cut off.
- Build it with Manus. Paste it into Manus, change what you like and build your version.
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