Development on this game was... complicated.
Ryan and I have a tradition of doing GMTK Jam every year, so we were already locked in. I had met Emily, Nat, and Sam earlier in the year and all independently asked if they could jam with me and I just... kept saying yes.
When the actual jam rolled around the reality of people's schedules became apparent. Emily was on tour of a web series she voiced in called BFDI (if you know, you know). We realized we didn't have the art support we needed so we added Katherine (also on tour with BFDI, but not actively on stage so she had more bandwidth). Ryan was very busy as well but he was confident he could get "something done." I've worked with Ryan enough to trust him.
I however did not know Emily, Nat, Katherine, or Sam nearly as well. We spent a good chunk of time just figuring out how to work together.
The game started as Nat's pitch: "what if the game is a twitter simulator and you're trying to figure out what today's drama is?" Nat is very active on Bluesky (and twitter before that) so she was well equipped to write for this. She easily came up with a dozen architypes of "the type of guy you see on twitter" that became our cast of characters.
Turning it into an information game was my idea, and one that Nat pushed back on at first. I felt it was important that the player had a goal. I approach game jam games the way MrBeast approaches making YouTube videos: come in, have a good time, get out. Except I don't do the sponsored ad read which is why I'm not a multi-millionaire, but I digress.
Nat and Emily wrote all of the dialogue (aka: the tweets). Katherine the main gameplay art, while everyone contributed profile pictures. Sam's main discipline is programming but since the game was made in Unity (hopefully my last ever Unity game!) he didn't feel equipped to contribute to writing code so instead he helped with playtesting.
It all came together in the end. There are a few loose ends (like hashtags that are only ever used once, because Nat didn't write them with the intent that they would be puzzle clues). I made the actual "fill in the blank" puzzles at the very end at the (now yearly tradiiton) all-nighter before the GMTK Game Jam deadline.