Holy moley I just did a 6-week jam. A lot has happened but this was how it went:

The journey

Day 1:

I do not come from a Christian background. My parents came from a country that practices state atheism and still does today. I don't know very many things about Satan and I understand Satan as a vague being that does stuff for no reason other than "free will". I felt I had a very weak foundation to create a story around this theme if my understanding of Satan is superficial. I had no game idea to work with, so I was off to an awkward start

My solution? I found an opportunity to work with HoneyNutFemios. She luckily had a game idea she was passionate about. We contacted, discussed details, and her story/game premise allows me to draw from paranormal topics which I knew more about than Satan. Things were good, I now had a sense of direction.

Week 1 & 2: The drawing board

The first things I did was literally not on the project itself, but to create a demo showcasing my incomplete text messaging plugin for RPGmaker MV. Then, I had to begin figuring out our art direction. I pitched the sidescroller design which saw massive success from Harold Jam 2023. The overview of my artistic choices which I've reapplied for Hawktober are explained in this post mortem from a different jam.

The very first step is to identify the most high-impact scene of our game premise. Very obviously it was going to be our ending cutscene. This meant I had to decide my entire art direction around the scene that will hit the hardest. Since this was a collaborative project, orienting our art direction was going to be much slower than if it had been a solo project which I can make spontaneous and rapid decisions without needing anyone's input.

It was not until the middle of week 2 that we had our entire art direction ironed out. Plenty of time was spent figuring out Z-sorting. We were coding in our major cutscenes as they were the most essential part of our minimum viable submission. My idea was that it was better that we do cutscenes first. If one of us were to dissappear the next day, we'd be left with a short story with no gameplay which would leave a stronger impact than a game with no story.

Week 3 & 4: Dev hell

Had plenty of conversations on what makes a great horror as we refined each other's ideas over time. I got excellent feedback from my partner for the cutscenes I coded in. Week four was definitely the most uncertain time since four weeks was a typical time period for many jams. We had no gameplay, only cutscenes. Week 4 was the beginning of my fall quarter and was a very intense week for my job in sports retail as baseball season came to a close. I made very little progress during this time.

Week 5: The sprint

From this point on the rest of the development story will be written in first person despite being a two-person project since I was the designated programmer, and the load was on my shoulders. Crunch time started right at this point as we had two weeks left to create our actual game - our cutscenes were done, now we had to stitch them together by coding a gameplay that connected our beginning to our ending. I beelined towards the end by constructing the event structure that goes from start to finish. After which, leftover time would go over to adding bonus content. My caffiene consumption definitely had spiked. By the end of week 5, our game was complete.

Playtest hell

I was not entirely happy with the feedback I got from playtesters. In particular there were a lot of nitpicks over how there was only one ending which made players feel their choices didn't matter. Many pieces of feedback made it quite clear that I have not poured in enough resources to explain the basic game mechanics.

Week 6:

Now that I added choices that lead to multiple endings, now I was not happy with how players kept getting the bad ending. I have a lot of questions as to why that is but I've then redesigned some dialogue and dialogue options hoping to make it easier for players to catch that Verity is not a good person to get advice from.

At the time of writing, week 6 is coming to a close. Overall, this was a very good run. I executed a project far more ambitious than any solo project I could have done for a jam.

What went right

The good

• It was definitely not a mistake for us to begin with building our cutscenes. While it played a part in why we had no game until the end of week 5, we minimized wasted resources for the entire six months and earned ourselves a highly ambitious game.
• I put careful thought into how I designed my events. Major questlines should be regulated by a progress variable rather than by switches. All switch names should be immediately obvious as to what they do, and switches should never be used in a manner not consistent with its naming. There were numerous last-minute changes that would leave me open to sequence-breaking bugs but by following good design patterns, sequence breaking bugs are kept to a minimum.
• Of all jam games, this was the heaviest on common events that I've ever designed. I feel I have competently designed the eventing system to be cohesive, easily changeable and minimize bugs.
• I managed to stress test my text-messaging plugin which gives me a lot of ideas on how to improve its fundamental design. The next iteration of this plugin will be completely different from version 0.3 which made its debut in this game!

The bad?

 A majority of game jams I've either won one or landed second place. There is very little I could say went wrong except possibly for neglecting to install YEP_CoreEngine so troubleshooting bugs reported by playtesters become easier. Overall I've felt I've had a very good grasp on good game jamming strategy.

If there were any lessons learned on what not to do, it came from checking up on the progress of other devs. Pick the wrong team mate and it can completely kill a project and you should always have a plan B in case one or all of your team mates dissappear on the next day. If your project does not have a plan B if that unthinkable scenario happens, you're in trouble. All I can say is I'm glad to have not experienced that problem.

Content and Ideas that didn't make it in

• We envisioned the project having Echo take part in more annoying debates. The cadance of the gameplay loop prevented me from being able to implement them and the cutscenes that did make it in allowed Echo to be only annoying in short conversations.
• Characters would have been given an option to hide inside various hiding spots in the rooms.
• There could have been a short scene where Ava had to fight off the devil snatching a character away, but that ran a risk of spoiling the ending too early and I did not have the time to make assets for such a difficult scene
• Zara was also originally envisioned to play a stronger mentor role but that role became shifted towards the laptop object and also shifted somewhat to Verity.
• One of our earlier ideas was that the religion of Wicca was to be involved. We decided it was better to leave out real world religions, and that Wicca today is so decentralized that it's better we just 'make something up' with regards to whatever belief system Ava advocated.
• An actual crayon drawing was close to being actually done for this game! Time constraints decided the rest. (May or may not attempt this on the final day of the submission period)
• Ava was supposed to have a run cycle and not just a walk cycle. Time constraints prevented this animation from being done.