Hey all, this year me and the team behind World in Ruin teamed up again to make a game about Mary Margaret.

The game is Death Whisper Diaries and it's an adventure/puzzle game where Margaret explores a little town solving a mystery.

We've also decided to go by Team Hi-lite this year, as these games have become more than just something that I made with help from others.

Shabello is taking care of music and some additional sfx work, Index is back as programmer and I am writing the story, some game design and 3D assets.

We've also added a few extra team members, Esskaden is working on some concepts for the characters and general artstyle, Alli is helping out with programming and game design and Marinofannar is working on 3D assets.

This means we've doubled the team size but it doesn't mean we're gonna make something 2x bigger, our plan is to have a more visually refined game that is more compact and focused than last year.

We're off to a good start with a lot of great ideas for the story, gameplay and art, things are moving a little slower than last year as a larger team means more planning and coordination is involved.

There's some great concepts, music and 3D assets already made but I'll save it for next time where I hope we can give everyone a better idea how the game plays and how it will look overall.

Hey all! We're wrapping up week 2 of the jam now and ready to show off a bit more content.

The first week was mostly figuring stuff out, writing a story summary, deciding on artstyle and general vibes, figuring some gameplay elements out etc.

The story summary went through about 3 revisions, we started with an idea that ended up being a little too ambitious so the later revisions took that core idea and scoped it into something more realistic while keeping the same themes and general ideas.

It didn't take us long to decide on the artstyle with Esskaden at the helm, he gave us a couple of potential directions and we all agreed that the more stylized cartoony look in the left was the right one.

I took some time to figure out how to best translate that look into a lowpoly retro 3D look and did some art tests:

There are a few other characters we are using for the jam and have concepts of but I'll show more of that later.

We also started to create some env. assets in that style, most of these are still blockouts but this is the general idea:

We have a bunch of extra assets ready but they're all super spoilery so we're gonna hold off on showing them for now.

We're also gonna have a CRT filter similar to last year so these images are not completely representative of the final look.

Music is also going well, Shabello is working hard on getting a couple of core themes ready this week before tackling level specific ones.

We're not quite ready to show off gameplay systems, we had to rework a few things as our original idea ended up being a little too hard to implement properly in the game jam timeframe while leaving time to iterate and design puzzles so we went with something a little simpler that is getting finished up this weekend hopefully, after that Alli will be focusing on blocking out the levels and puzzles.

The plan is to finish up character assets this weekend and start dialogue and cutscene implementation next week while getting some extra env. asset work done in between. 

Overall I'm very happy with the progress so far, we have a lot of assets but are a little behind on content, hopefully we'll have some of the cutscenes in a first iteration by next devlog.

Until next time...

Hey all, It's been a while since the last devlog, plan was every Thursday/Friday but the last few days were just a little too busy for us, I just wanted to give a little update on our progress.

The project is going well overall, We have most assets ready and are working on putting together the last few areas and cinematics.

all dialogue has been implemented and Esskaden's 2D art assigned to each corresponding line.

We still have the later half of cutscenes left to make but as all assets are ready we'll hopefully get them up in the next couple of days.

The game is set in a small rural town and the surrounding areas:

We are still missing the last area and a detail pass on all the entire game but overall most level work has been finished.

Gameplay wise all the mechanics are in but we still need to do some testing, the gameplay is mostly exploration plus some light physics puzzles.

Aside from that there are things like UIs, Menus, Options and progression triggers that need to be implemented.

This year it's been a bit harder to keep up on the devlogs because the project required way more planning and iteration on the gameplay mechanics, it took us a while to settle on the final story and our original plans for the gameplay ended up being not as fun as we expected, in the end we managed to figure things out but it has meant that the workload has been a bit heavier in the later half.

That being said, I feel pretty good about our progress and am expecting everything to be finished before the deadline.

Hey all, We're at the end of the jam, or at least the submission period.

It's been an intense month for us, the project took a few pivots during development but I am happy to say that we managed to get it out the door with a couple of days to spare.

The final game is mostly a narrative game with a few puzzles and some areas to explore, playtime should fall somewhere between 15 to 20 min which is well under the 30 min limit, overall we wanted to have a bit more gameplay but we kinda struggled with getting our gameplay systems set up in the first half and therefor we didn't have enough time in the second half to make all the levels we originally intended.

We still have the entire story we set out to make but the later half of the game is mostly cutscenes instead of levels to explore.

Ultimately I am very happy with the end result and feel like we managed to put together a very solid and complete feeling game from a visual and narrative point of view.

The original idea we had for gameplay was similar to the one we ended up using but focused more on having objects attract to each other with magnetism instead of just lifting them up and manipulating them like it is in the final game, We had some prototypes set up early but it wasn't until around the end of week 2 that we started to think about when kind of gameplay scenarios we could build around that mechanic, which is where we started to run into issues, eventually we settled on making it work like it does today but it left us little time to wrap up puzzle and level design.

The mechanics we ended up using are good though and in a more fleshed out game they would have a lot of gameplay potential.

Visually I wanted to iterate on the lowpoly retro mixed with modern rendering techniques we had last year, We added extra shader features such as vertex wobble and improved the texture style a lot with dithering and other filtering and made them feel more like they came from a game from the PSX era.

The last week was a mix of setting up the cutscenes and replacing all placeholder assets and level blockout with custom geometry along with some polish in areas we finished earlier, we wrapped up work during the weekend and spent a couple of days dealing with any issues that popped up.

I hope you enjoy the game and good luck to all the other submissions, I've played through a few so far and the level of quality across the board is just insane, every year the bar is raised and it continues to inspire me to improve our games.

Until next time,

- Leo (Leotime0)