[Game] Make It Make Cents

My friends and I made a game for GMTK 2026 ("Game Maker's Toolkit", an annual game-making event), called Make It Make Cents.

You can play it here, please submit a review while you're at it. :]

Game Jam Results Are Out!

We did pretty well! This is actually pretty insane o-o

When you do the math, out of 10,599 submissions (which is the most submissions GMTK's received thus far), we're basically top 0.1% for Narrative, top 0.5% for Creativity, and top ~1-2% for all other categories.

| Criteria   | Rank | Top %      | Better than |
|------------|------|------------|-------------|
| Narrative  | 10   | top 0.094% | ~99.91%     |
| Creativity | 53   | top 0.50%  | ~99.50%     |
| Enjoyment  | 144  | top 1.36%  | ~98.64%     |
| Artwork    | 208  | top 1.96%  | ~98.04%     |
| Audio      | 221  | top 2.08%  | ~97.91%     |

This is the highest we've ever placed in any game jam (and since this is my first game jam, pretty hard for me to top :P)

Developer's Notes

Basic premise is that a family has moved to a country that has the Verbal Tariff Act, which bills non-citizens $1 per word they speak. You guide this family through several scenarios where saying the right thing matters quite a bit, like job interviews, doctor's appointments, etc.

So that you know who to blame, I came up with the core mechanic of deleting phrases from pre-written lines of dialogue, as well as the Sam's Soda Pop mechanic.

"Wouldn't it be funny if when your balance hit $0, you could replenish it by breaking into a sponsored ad, mid-conversation?"

The "trim a pre-written line" idea isn't entirely new.

Back in 2024, I made a game called "Town of Turing," which was a social deduction game where one player, the AI-assisted player, can only speak using raw LLM output, and has to blend in with a town of humans who are actively hunting for the AI-assisted player.

It turns out it's notoriously difficult for the AI-assisted player to not get caught, so I softened the difficulty by letting the AI-assisted player edit their LLM output. I didn't want to swing in the opposite direction and let them freely rewrite their LLM output, so I landed on a compromise, which was that the AI-assisted player can only delete words from the LLM output, never add their own.

My Town of Turing trimming mechanic was rather constrained trimming, where I permitted only trim-L or trim-R but not trim-M.

I always saw trim-M as a road not taken, that could've materialized in a different, potentially funnier / narratively richer game, and so Make It Make Cents was a good place to do it :)

Make It Make Cents revives the same core rule as Town of Turing, where you can only delete words, never add your own, except now without any AI whatsoever (thank god) and trim-M is now allowed to exist. You get handed a pre-written line (by us writers this time, not an LLM!) and asked to trim it down.

On Make It Make Cents itself, I chipped in on some of the programming and writing alongside Stephen and Annabelle, both of whom marathoned the night before submission to drag it across the line and I owe them for that one.

I couldn't have done it without the artists / writers / composers / programmers / everybody. 3.5 days, wow, look what these people can do. So thank you!