Arctic Game Global Game Jam 2025

Over 120 people joined us this year, with buses escorting attendees from Skellefteå, Luleå, Boden and Umeå. FutureGames had a remarkable presence at the event, with seven students even making the trip from their Polish department after Piotr Matecki, head of Futuregames Warsaw gamedev, suggested going on the school Discord. 

Still, Piotr is confident that under normal circumstances there would have been even greater numbers joining:

We have a vibrant and colourful gang in Warsaw, and I am sure more students would join if not for a game project, GP2, all our schools work on now in cross-site teams.

To drum up excitement for the event, this year also featured an opening ceremony packed with inspiring speeches. We had Sima Haddadin covering how a startup could spring from a new game, Kristofer Stenskog from Mind Detonator sharing what investors look for in one, and Johan Tjäder (RankOne Global) providing insights into how market analysis can help you identify an ideal audience. 

Johan is a big fan of championing statistics and data, describing how they shouldn’t “stifle creativity, but rather empower it with direction”. A few teams even picked up his RankOne tool as guidance when formulating their game ideas, and Johan was optimistic that this way of working is important for maintaining a thriving games industry:

[We believe data-driven development] is needed to create a more diverse and sustainable ecosystem moving forward. This way gamers will be able to get more targeted/niche games to experience and more game developers to make a living doing what they love.

Marc Zaku, the regional organiser for The Global Game Jam Scandinavia also kindly joined us from Germany to co-host the event with local indie developer, Harry Heath. Together they covered a load of tips & tricks to help make it a successful game jam and announced this year’s theme: “Bubble”. 

Harry also reflected on how a particularly fruitful game jam led to him pivoting business direction altogether. In his case, he put another title on indefinite hold to focus full-time on Pawsta, a cozy cooking game, which is now set to have a Kickstarter campaign launching in a few months’ time. 

Of course, Tim Leinert from Arctic Game was also key in organising the event. He did an amazing job of rallying up excitement during the opening ceremony and was ever dutiful in looking out for the guests and ensuring they got good rest and food throughout the course of the weekend.

The game jam brings together people from all walks of life, including industry veterans, beginners interested in game development, and hobbyists. For plenty, it was their first-ever jam, including Athena Tran, who thought Jörn was a perfect place for the occasion:

A cozy town with a magical atmosphere. Meeting like-minded people from all over Sweden and other countries. The trip was worthwhile, and I really enjoyed jamming with my team. 

One big surprise was The Global Game Jam selected our site to be featured on the global livestream. A group of local heroes also gathered together around the hotel venue’s open fire pit to have a cozy chat with Jessica Rowley, the community and event manager for Global Game Jam. 

Johan Linder and Marc Zaku hosted from our side, before bringing on some guests. First up was Christian Carlos sharing his journey travelling from Warsaw to attend the event, joined by Ingrid Fridesjö from Blamorama Games to share her first-time jamming experience. 

Tim Leinert talked about Arctic Game’s mission to support the local games industry, while Em Prieto covered the experience of setting up the games incubator Mind Detonator in a small village environment. 

Finally, Harry Heath had the chance to chat cozy games with Jess Rowley and tell some stories about his post-game jam experience building up interest in Pawsta and getting positive reinforcement at events like Games Ground Berlin.

The environment wowed Jessica:
[Jörn’s site] was definitely top-tier cozy! Each site was so unique that it’s impossible to compare them, the beauty of being able to take a peek into the jam sites all across the globe is seeing how dynamically unique they all are.

This was all made possible by the technical wizardry of Erik Okfors, who exceeded all expectations by making it an exceptionally professional livestream on our part.

Plenty of the jammers also took the opportunity to brave the snow and visit the Mind Detonator gaming village while in Jörn. One of the studios from the incubator, Ballistic Pork, was even holding playtests of a new prototype of their debut title, Cloven Blade.

Eliott Eklöf, who studies UX and Game Design at Futuregames, Skellefteå found the Mind Detonator trip particularly inspiring. To her surprise, Eliott found that the small-town aspect of working in Jörn could be a great fit for her:

As someone who’s longed for moving to bigger cities, it’s been quite a shift to now dream of working in a studio at Mind Detonator!

All in all, 22 games were worked on during the jam, all centred around the theme of “Bubble”. Essentially all of them were developed to a high enough standard within 48 hours to be showcased on stage at the closing ceremony of the event. 

To get an idea of how varied the end results were, despiting sharing the same theme,  here’s a description of a few of the games:

• Clean Drift – drive a sponge around dirty plates & dishes to clean them!
• Cat Escapes Eldritch Horror – use bubblegum to help a cat float away to safety!
• Bubble Brawl – a competitive bubble-blowing game

Though most teams utilised established game engines like Unity or Godot, this wasn’t the case for everyone. One duo decided purposely to avoid touching code entirely, by creating “Bubble Planet Chase” with only chat & compose prompts in Cursor.

Justyna Fryczak (Windup Games), Dimitra Papacosta (CRG) and newcomer Ena Vine also deviated from the script. They decided to use the web-based tool Twine to create a narrative experience with folk horror elements: “The Fates”

Justyna described Twine as very “beginner-friendly” and a perfect way to minimise stress while getting creative:

I’ve been interested in Twine for a few years now, but needed an excuse to just jump into it and create something. When I heard that Dimitra writes a lot as a hobby and GGJ was coming up – I thought that was the perfect excuse with low commitment cost, because that’s exactly what game jams are for.

Dimitra also shared how it was an easy choice, given her passion for storytelling & desire to maintain a relatively smooth production, given the short time constraint of the jam:

Since most well-scoped game jam projects tend to be platformer-like with easy mechanics, as a huge fan of both books and story games, I think Twine is a great approach for focusing instead on interactive narratives.

As if the time limit wasn’t enough, the team behind “The Fates” also took on a few of this year’s official diversifiers, a list of extra constraints that aim to help games stand out further from the multitude of games produced worldwide – this year it was over 12000! – by sorting them into special standout categories.

However, Justyna confessed this mostly came about due to happenstance:

When we looked at the list of diversifiers it felt like our interests simply overlapped with the intentions of the GGJ main organiser team, call it luck, intuition or even clairvoyance!

Besides that, we both love working with constraints, they fuel our creativity and can give it a strategic direction, which is something that’s on our minds most of the time during our regular jobs.

We also had a public vote at the end of the jam, and though the outcome was nail-bitingly close, “You Pop” won over the audience with its mix of cozy gameplay and an unexpected horror twist, to be crowned winner of the game jam!

Group leader, Tom Fjällström (Saltlight Studio), shared the design process behind “You Pop”, describing how the team aimed to subvert the calmness of popping bubblewrap by making it deter an approaching monster. To achieve this, they settled on the monster feeling “silly far away, [but] scary up close”. Like the rest of the team, Tom was surprised when they were announced as the winners of the jam though:

Right before the result, we were talking amongst ourselves about how amazing the other game jam entries were and which ones we thought would win, so we had kinda dismissed ourselves as an option already. So the win for the team came as a big happy surprise.

Takes on cozy games are certainly becoming more commonplace these days. Jess from GGJ reflected on why this phenomenon is so prevalent at the moment:

The rise in popularity [of cozy games] definitely correlates with a way for players and creators to find some comfort and escape from the stresses of everyday life. 

That, and cozy games can tend to be more accessible for those who may not be initially into video games but there’s something for everyone in the genre.

After the jam, it was also announced that everyone could utilise an extra week to give their games a bit more polish if they were able to. Through this initiative, most of the games have been posted to itch.io where they are now playable, and we encourage you to check them out!

Four more winners emerged in different categories after a week of voting on the itch.io page. These were: Soap Me Up (Most Relevant to the Theme), Cat Escapes Eldritch Horror (Best Art), The Fates (Best Sound/ Atmosphere) & Clean Drift (Overall Enjoyment)!

Looking towards the future, Arctic Game are confident about closing the gap between us and Gothenberg to become Sweden’s biggest game jam site. Piotr Matecki too foresees great opportunity in bringing more students from Warsaw along in the future, so we can expect the next event to be even more international:

We have a plan to inspire students from all sites to attend the Arctic Game Jam next year in much larger numbers and use this opportunity to foster integration among them.

This game jam was made possible through the Game Attraction North project, which is funded by: The European Union, Region Norrbotten, Region Västerbotten, Skellefteå kommun, Umeå kommun, Luleå kommun and Boden Business Park. 

Also, don’t miss the podcast episode recorded on-site by Spelsvin (Swedish only)! 

// Written by Harry Heath