GoedWare Devlog

Note: This devlog will go into spoilers on the mystery of the in-game apocalypse and easter eggs.

Pre-jam Plans

I had thought for ages my next GoedWare Jam game was going to be another room escape game incorporating some new features I had learned in GDevelop. Then, right before the jam, I ended up joining Micro Jam with the theme warmth for survival. I made a very rushed a top down rpg-ish survival game about a girl stuck the frozen wilderness, needing to find enough firewood to keep her from freezing on her journey home and really wanted to make a longer game in the same vein with more features, like stats for energy, warmth, water, etc..

This game would require me to use Wolf RPG Editor (like RPG Maker, only free), so I worried a bit about getting less feedback and ratings since Wolf games can only be played on Windows (not web). However, I've participated in enough Goed Jams to be pretty certain that even if I got less plays, so long as I made a semi-decent looking game and made my usual effort to rate and give feedback back to my fellow jammers, I should be able to earn the required 10 rating minimum. In addition, I decided to post some screen shots, etc.. on the Discord in hopes maybe it might peak some people's interest ahead of time.

Brainstorming

So, I had my idea and felt that any of the five possible themes except Zero UI could fit it. The theme ended up being isolation, the one I had been rooting for, since I felt it would fit my game the best, yet it took me a bit to decide how to incorporate in into the game. The obvious way was the character being alone on their journey home, but that felt too easy and too similar to my last survival game.

I started writing down premises in a Notepad file, such as “character ends up on island separated from their family they worked with as a team and each night a dream a family member is teaching them a new survival task until they know enough to escape.” Or “Switch between two players they in isolated areas, one locked in somewhere or too injured to travel with the other.” Neither peaked my interest, but fortunately the third one did:

• Char sent through portal to empty, alternate/future version of there world. They have to go to high mountain to connect with enough magic to get home. Along way, find clues as to what happened to the world. Maybe know how to prevent it when get home.”

I really liked it and kept thinking of more interesting aspects, like the world had no magic, so the character, a wizard apprentice, would also be isolated from his magic, as well as loved ones and people in general. Making it so that the world drained mana over time allowed me to add a magic stat to go with the basic food/energy stat. I also ended up accidentally getting a really fun idea for an easter egg while thinking up a meeting with the ghost of the witch who destroyed the world. I noticed a couple of the words in her discussion were technically old GoedWare Jam themes and challenged myself to fit them all into the witch's explanation. Several such as Absorb, Broken Physics and Extreme were easy in context though some were harder. The hardest was Love | Death | Robots, since this medieval fantasy world should not really have them. I ended up having the witch say that she was like a robot due to her obsession.

My final plan for the game was have the main character, Toru (Japanese name meaning wanderer), get zapped to the future world by a mysterious orb from a ruined shrine on a nearby mountain. After a brief cross-time discussion with the wizard saying to go to the shrine and try to connect with enough magic to go home, he would be on his own. He'd travel to what was left of the nearby village, stay there overnight, climb the mountain, enter a cave, stay there overnight, arrive at the shrine, optionally find the witch in her hidden cave, and return home to his world. Along the way, he could search and find letters and journals revealing details about the apocalypse he would like to prevent if possible. And of course, he would need to survive the nights by finding enough food and mana to not have either stat go to zero.

Development

An anxiety early in the jam came when I thought about Toru compared to the protagonist of my last game, Aika. While distressed about her situation, Aika was calm and went with the flow, immediately deciding to find shelter and firewood for the night and decide how to get home the next day. Toru on the other hand was panicking over being alone in this ruined world with no magic, even before he lost contact with the wizard. Toru was a character with an arc going on, which was great for theme, but could be bad for immersion since his feelings would probably be in contrast with the player's desire to explore and collect items to survive. As I created events across the various maps, I learned that Toru could still be capable despite his misgivings and became more confident over time. I came to decide that even if Toru was different calm, task-focused Aika, that did not mean the player could not also be immersed in his feelings themselves and watching him realize he could accomplish things without magic.

In regards to gameplay, it turned out I had to scale down on a lot of my prejam plans. I think it was largely because I had such a complex story to create. I knew there was probably going to be trouble when half way through the jam, I was still finishing the scene where Toru is first sent to the future world and trying to figure out going on and had no survival aspects set up beyond creating a mana potion and a few kinds of food that would make sense to find in universe (berries from bushes and well preserved dried meat). These items are still findable in early gameplay, though since Toru's stats never change, there is no point in consuming them.

With story and unraveling the mystery of the world now the only aspects of the game, I doubled down on them. Since finding letters and journals was now the only part of the game up to the players wits, I felt it needed to be a little riskier so finding them would take more thought than mindlessly interacting with anything that looked important. I accomplished this by having some actions involve a choice that would occasionally result in Toru's immediate death. I tried to make these insta deaths make sense and have each map have a healthy balance of finding rewarding items and dying from your risk. 

For example, the ruined village had two stuck doors. At the inn door, Toru observed a collapsed ceiling in front of through the window, the other at the doctor's house appeared to be just stuck. Upon being asked whether you wanted to force it, both doors made you think, but the inn door was "iffier" and would make sense if you died. I made sure right off the player was told that this was “a world you could die in” one, empathize the need to think and two, encourage players to save. While I tried to make the insta deaths logical if you were thinking, they could still be vague and sudden and I had no idea just how easy or confusing players were going to find them.

Post-jam Thoughts

It's always really hard to plan for scope during a jam. I thought I would have plenty of time since I was able to make a relatively functioning survival game in two three days for Micro jam, but adding in the complex story, mystery and all those notes and journal entries took up a good chunk of the jam. I also never really followed through with my plan to post updates on my game in Discord (besides one map early on). I wish I had, since those who did seem to have gotten a lot of helpful feedback during development and jammers who were interested in playing their final games. On the flip side, I did include enough notes for my devlog that writing it was a lot easier and helped me remember some points I'd forgotten about.

Looking back at the game, one thought come to me: where is the orb in the future? Was it still in there wizards/Marabell's house? Did she take it to the cave? It was in the final hours of the jam I realized Marabell needed to be the one to have summoned Toru to the future since, if the orb had done it randomly in Toru's time, Toru going to the future would already have happened and it would have made less sense for any information he found to prevent the mana apocalypse. However, if Marabell did it from the future, this could be a new event in Toru's time and not render our learning about what happened pointless. To answer where is the orb, I think it should be in Marabell's cave, since it would make sense for her to have it with her.

To conclude, here is a list of what I would like to fix after voting, in order of ease and likelihood of implementation:

• Upload version where ending is working properly so people don't have to watch the Drive video
• Add the orb to Marabell's cave
• Go through and fix spelling errors (there were a lot at the end of the game)
• A sentence here and there to show a more blatant character arc for Toru coming to realize he can do things without magic and while he likes magic, he is still capable without it. I did have a few sentences to that effect, but want to add a few more and finalize it by saying so at the end.
• Make the cave much wider so it's harder to find Cass's journal
  • Have the player need to find a rock to open the chest with the journal.
• Add magic depletion/need to find and use mana potions. Want to do the same with food, but feel magic the most important stat to start with.