MAX KENNEDY
5 WEEKS EARLIER
Designed for the GMTK Game Jame 2026 where the theme was Countdown, 5 Weeks Earlier is a narrative-focused management game where players are tasked with building a spaceship crew that will carry the last remnants of humanity. Over the course of the game players will have to review applications that arrive on their desk and decide whether to hire the applicant or replace an existing member of the crew with a new one.
According to the GMTK 2026 results by LazyPandaStudio and ShinzaLab, 5 Weeks Earlier ranked #1403 out of all total submissions.
You are our only hope.
TEAM MEMBERS
Brian Kolb (Designer, Programmer)
Daniel McGowan (Designer, Programmer)
Jamie Robinson (Programmer)
Kat Brown (Artist)
Max Kennedy (Designer)
Rhiann Steenstrup (Audio Design)
Willow Heo (Artist)
DURATION
1 day of pre-production
4 days of development
ENGINE
Unity
PRODUCT OWNERSHIP
Level Design
Look and Feel
UI Design
PRE-PRODUCTION
Due to the time constraints imposed by the game jam, the pre-production and ideation phase for 5 Weeks Earlier was incredibly tight . The theme reveal video contained many clips pertaining to rockets and space ships. Straight away my mind jumped to the Visions of the Future posters by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, particularly the poster titled The Grand Tour as inspiration. I proposed the concept for a Papers Please style game where players would have to choose from a select group of the people who they believed to the best to take on a rocket ship before the Earth was destroyed.
The group resonated with my idea and was chosen moving forward. With two other artists and myself as a visual designer on the project, we prototyped the the player view of being inside of a control tower overseeing the rocket launch platform with the moon progressively getting closer in the background as the game progressed. The rest of the day spent on pre-production was fleshing out the systems required for the game to work, which included what thematic statistics do players need to care about when building a space ship crew and the gameplay flow.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. (December 2019). The Grand Tour [Art]. NASA.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. (December 2019). Earth [Art]. NASA.
DEVELOPMENT
Once pre-production had wrapped, the team then split off to complete their individual contributions for the game. I had been placed in charge of the world design for the project as well as the UI design. Working with Brian and Daniel I was able to create a design for the UI that included some fields where they were then able to go and the data tables to.
Additionally, using Unity's terrain tools, I was able to quickly paint and texture a terrain that would serve as the backdrop for the game. In the interest of time the team used a foliage asset pack and water shader pack to populate the environment, however; I was able to model a grass billboard texture quickly in photoshop to use.
REFINEMENT
In the last two days of the game jam, my focus was directed towards continuing the polish the game environment through the inclusion of wind streaks inspired by The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002) as well as post processing volumes.
With the post processing volumes, I wanted to create three different volumes that would inter-change as the game progressed: one normal, one night and one end-of-the-world themed. Brian created a set of scriptable objects that would allow me to save and load different volumes and global lighting depending on which round the player had reached.
Whilst it was a subtle detail, I had fun implementing the movement animation for the Humvee driving from the control tower to the rocket ship. It added a small world building aspect of moving crew and supplies to the ship before it took off which I thought was really cool.
