Ticking Heart

This is our first ever 'finished' game and first ever completed Game Jam.

This game was made for the GMTK Game Jam 2026, the theme was Count Down

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In this short game you play as a Little Wizard who made fun of the Time Witch, which caused her to curse him with a Ticking Heart. His time is running out and he has to go through her dungeon to find her and kill her to save himself.

Instead of a stable healthbar, your health is slowly counting down and with each hit you lose more of your precious time, you have to rush and make it to the end before you run out of time.

You are able to Shoot by pressing SHIFT and toggle "Time Crunch" mode by pressing Shift, when in Time Crunch mode you gain speed but you lose the ability to shoot and your remaining time drains fast so it should be only used in short bursts.

To progress through the levels you must kill every enemy on the level before the portal (red square) turns green (we couldn't think of anything better)

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We had to scrap some ideas, such as the Time Witch boss fight due to time and skill issues (Our headcanon is that she is just like really really weak so she has 1 hp), we couldn't really figure it out because we were mostly learning everything on the fly with tutorials when it comes to programming and figuring Godot out.

The original concept had multiple abilities and more enemy types. The game isn't as polished as we would've liked but we are satisfied with it being our first ever completed game jam game.

It is definitely rough around the edges, with probably a ton of undiscovered bugs but I think what we managed to achieve in 4~ days is a great start :)

Syntax Error Studios | 2026