GoedWare Jam 13 Devlog

GoedWare Jam 13 has been one crazy jam for me. Over the past 10 days, I have had more ideas started, scrapped, yet actually semi-finished than any other jam I recall. Only counting ones with actual game files, I have worked on three different games this jam and the one I settled on, “Trent Breaks the Loop,” I basically made all on the final day. It would be a tall order to discuss everything I learned since I experimented with so much this jam, so I am going to focus on the goal I set several weeks before the start of this jam: create a “finished” game.

I have participated in GoedWare Jam every jam since jam 5, only missed submitting twice and only once did I submit an unfinished prototype with no ending. However, I feel that only the first game I submitted was actually properly "finished. " By "finished," mean more than just having and ending. The game itself actually has to feel like there were not large swaths unimplmented.

I don't regret submitting these “finished” games to past jams because a lot of people did enjoy them, I got some great feedback and enjoyed being able to participate in the voting process. However, this I wanted to submit a game I felt was finished. I am proud to say I did release a "finished" game, but it was a crazy ride.

My first idea for the theme Breaking The Loop was an RPG Maker role playing game about a young guy named Trent in a terrible low paying dead-end job with a toxic boss. To strengthen this, I also made his job the most ridiculous thing I could think of – polisher of the mayor's gold statues of himself. After going through a few days, Trent decides he wants to break the loop and there would have been multiple endings he could achieve by talking to people, discovering other job prospects, increasing his physical strength education and some other ways.

The end result for this game was that it took me several days just to design the maps, especially the town map, which I had to make a paper concept map for due to it's size and complexity. This worked well, but when it was getting time to set up the major gameplay and stats, I found myself stalling. This may have been in part due to some IRL issues that caused me to lose a couple days, but I think despite my desire to keep my game simple, I had derived a very complex setup and I knew if I was feeling this unmotivated to finish, I needed try a different, simpler game.

I pondered a couple ideas and with 3 days left in the jam, decided on a GDevelop side scroller about person in an odd dreamscape where every time they try to advance to the next screen, they are returned to the beginning of the scene. It would have been a philosophical game about being mentally stuck. Immediately afterward, I had another idea for a joke RPG Maker role playing game about a guy who has to travel around a circular/looping path that goes around a big cliff. He becomes frustrated and decides to find a way to make a path through the cliff/literally break the loop.

This game became “Trent Breaks the Loop,” the game I eventually submitted. However, both games were neck and neck with my desire to work on them, so I was actually toying with the idea of submitting both. I had never imagined doing that before, but since both were short, I found myself thinking it would be neat if I could submit these two very different games and see which one did better.

Over the next couple days, I made most of the main map for Trent, though I mostly worked on the other game I had no title for beyond “Unititled Loop.” Then the last day, I suddenly had a stronger urge to finish Trent. Maybe it was because I liked the idea. Maybe because I was getting to the point where I would have to add some longer dialog scenes to the game and I have a harder time doing that in GDevelop. Either, I was committed to finishing this game and knew I could.

One thing that sped up the process was that I reused the file, settings, a forest map and the character Trent from my first idea.  Most of the game was story and humor, which I am good at. The rest was exploring and finding objects to advance, also within my skills, and the scope miraculously fit one day.

 What have I learned from this experience? I guess I learned that I am correct I need to keep my scope small and that doing so can allow me to finish a game in one day If need be. Have I learned how to tell what "small" is at a glance? Maybe I have, maybe I haven't. I think it might best be summed up by this paraphrased line from The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. 

“If there was one thing Trisha had learned from life, it was that sometimes you needed to go back for your bag and sometimes you didn't. It just had yet to teach her how to distinguish the difference.”

:D