Scoping Your Project
How to plan a game you can actually finish in 72 hours. Start small, cut features early, and polish what matters.
The single most common reason jam games don't ship is scope. You have a long weekend, not a long career — pick something small enough that the boring middle 60% (UI, win condition, polish, audio) actually fits. Treat scope as a design constraint, not a guess.
Pick one verb
Great jam games can usually be described by a single verb: jump, throw, hide, build, paint, sneak. Pick yours, and design every system to make that verb feel good. If you find yourself adding a second verb in the first day, drop it or cut something else. 'It's a stealth game where you also craft and trade' is two jams' worth of work; 'it's a stealth game' is one.
Cut the scope in half, then in half again
Whatever you originally pitched, halve it. Then look at what's left and halve it again. The remaining quarter is roughly what you'll actually finish to a polished state. The discarded three-quarters can come back as stretch goals once the quarter is shippable. Real designers do this; it's not pessimism, it's planning around how slow real iteration is.
Build a vertical slice on day one
By the end of the first day, get one minute of gameplay end-to-end: title screen → play → win or lose → return to title. It will be ugly and shallow, but it will be playable. From there you only widen and polish; you never start a system you can't finish. If you can't ship a vertical slice in a day, your scope is wrong, full stop.
Lean on what s&box gives you free
Use the Citizen player model, the built-in PlayerController for first/third person, NetworkHelper for multiplayer scaffolding, free cloud assets from sbox.game for environments and props, and the standard ModelRenderer/CameraComponent for the basics. Custom shaders, custom physics, custom networking layers, and custom animation graphs are jam killers — every hour you spend on infra is an hour you don't spend on what makes your game memorable.
Have a 'done' definition
Before you start, write down what 'finished' looks like in one sentence. 'Two players race a kart around three tracks and the fastest wins' is a clear finish line. 'A platformer with cool mechanics' is not. When you're tempted to add a feature mid-jam, hold it up against the finish line — if it's not on the path, it doesn't go in.