Potkeeter — Somehow, I'm Not Even Surprised Anymore

Somehow, I'm not even surprised anymore.

Potkeeter is a rage-bait platformer about a legendary musketeer who somehow managed to get himself stuck inside a cooking pot in the middle of an alien invasion.

His legs are useless. His pride remains intact.

With no ability to jump or walk, the Legendary Potkeeter must use his musket to propel himself through the battlefield. Shoot to generate recoil, parry incoming attacks to redirect momentum, and climb your way through an increasingly ridiculous alien war.

It's a simple concept with a cruel execution.

You don't have a jump button. You don't have a dodge button. Your weapon is your movement system, and every encounter is another opportunity to accidentally launch yourself back to the bottom.

But while the game is about fighting your way upward, its development had a rather different challenge.

I was running two game jams at the same time.

If you've read my An Unfinished Game article, you might remember that the project was already running during this period. GAME TODAY 2026 started on September 11, while Bezi Mega Jam 1 began on September 14.

That meant I had two projects running simultaneously, with overlapping production schedules and deadlines.

A few months earlier, this would probably have been enough to make me panic. I might have dropped one project, rushed both, or simply watched everything fall apart.

But surprisingly, that didn't happen.

Both projects were actually doing better in terms of scope control and completion than I expected.

The difference was that this time, I knew what I was getting into.

I had already anticipated the possibility of running multiple jams, so I divided Slafurry Studios' resources and tried to make sure each project could continue without requiring me to constantly move back and forth between them.

I even prepared for some rather unfortunate scenarios.

During Potkeeter's development, our level designer had to leave midway through the jam due to private circumstances. Instead of stopping production to find a replacement, I reassigned the Audio Engineer to help with level design. This allowed me to focus on finding and evaluating audio assets instead of spending more time restructuring the team.

Our main programmer also had to leave because of another competition, including part of the final week.

And yet, the project kept moving.

The bots helped a lot, too. Our automated itch.io deployment and Google Drive retrieval workflows had become increasingly important. Without them, managing two projects simultaneously would have been significantly more difficult.

For once, the system was doing what it was supposed to do.

People could keep working, responsibilities could shift, and projects didn't immediately collapse whenever someone became unavailable.

I was starting to trust the workflow rather than relying entirely on my own presence.

Then came the twist.

An Unfinished Game somehow made it into the GAME TODAY 2026 finals.

Which was a problem.

Not because getting into the finals was bad, obviously. It's actually great news.

The problem was that I had entered that competition expecting us to lose.

I wasn't planning around the possibility that both projects would demand so much attention at the same time.

Now, with the submission deadlines approaching on September 29 and October 3, I was facing a decision I really didn't want to make.

I wanted to finish both.

But I knew that finishing both properly was impossible.

There was no clever workflow adjustment that could magically create more time. No additional bot could solve the problem. And pushing everyone harder would only recreate the exact production problems we had spent so much time trying to avoid.

So, with a heavy heart, I chose to sacrifice Potkeeter.

Not by abandoning it completely, but by leaving it unfinished while shifting my attention toward getting An Unfinished Game ready for its final build.

And yes, the irony was almost too perfect.

The game about learning when to stop was now the reason I had to stop working on another game.

Sometimes, production management means accepting that not every project can reach the finish line at the same time.

It wasn't the outcome I wanted, but it was the decision I believed was necessary.

After that, I had another discussion with some of the senior members of Slafurry Studios.

We started asking a much bigger question.

After all these game jams, prototypes, experiments, and production lessons, were we finally ready to release our first game that originally started as a game jam project?

And more importantly...

Which one would it be?

Somehow, I'm not even surprised anymore.