Hey, not sure if a lot of ppl are still checking out the community pages but I said I'd do some sort of post mortem after submitting so here I go.
First of all, the positive reception both on the stream and from everyone leaving comments has been incredibly heartwarming to see, there's always some part of you that is afraid whatever you're making isn't going to "click" with ppl or you overlook some major issue that renders the game unplayable.
Also big thanks to Shabello for all her hard work on the soundtrack, it really is the heart and soul of the game.
When the jam officially started I set out to make a simple kart racer where you could play as a few different characters and go though a grand prix type competition with very little story, after a couple of days of tinkering I had a vehicle prototype and was ready to start properly plan it out.
Later I was playing Genshin Impact, just wandering around doing some side content when I thought, "man I wish I was making an open world game like this"
So that's when I started wondering if I could maybe do something a little more ambitious than the kart racer, and a flood of ideas starting coming to me, I actually stopped playing and just started writing down what I thought of.
The original idea for the game
As I started working on the project I started to pull influence from games like Arceus, BotW, Nier and Xenoblade more.
In general, I wanted a game with a sense of scale.
I saw some in the stream chat wondering how we managed to deliver the amount of content we had and it mostly came down to a few different aspects:
- Good planning and willingness to adjust scope based on progress, don't be afraid to scale back and cut stuff early, cutting a troublesome aspect gives you time to make everything else better and/or expand the scope on other tasks.
- Modular assets and good asset pipeline
I generally make most of my environmental assets modular, then once I have a good library of generic assets I start thinking about more unique stuff, this means if I end up not being able to make the more unique assets in time I have something to fall back on instead.
- Experience, I've been working with Unreal for about 4 years now so there's a lot of stuff I've figured out how to handle before.
Focusing on story and visuals does mean that the game is generally not that interesting gameplay wise, it's serviceable and works for what we wanted to do but some of the jam games had some really creative and fun mechanics, which is what I feel like our game might be missing a bit.
I also probably shouldn't have had the game be a big open world, I could have achieved a lot of the same wow factor with a more Zelda OOT style map layout instead while making the side content feel less out of the way.
When I started the jam I specifically had 2 goals in mind:
- Deliver on a complete narrative
- Not to crunch and get burned out after the jam
-Story-
I was really committed to not just having my game be some "first chapter" like I did last year, I wanted to tell a story and have a satisfying ending.
Sure, I did end on a cliffhanger but this time it was on purpose, not just a cover up for not having been able to end the story properly, I had a few different ideas on how and where to cut to credits and the whole Dark Schippie Damian thing came pretty late into development.
Originally the game was supposed to end after defeating Gigantimus, with Dark Schippie being an optional fight that you would unlock by finding a few different Sumiv Warring Logs scattered around the map.
I generally shared a lot of stuff on the discord but kept the Gigantimus model a secret.
Sumiv's Logs would have been about them searching for giant robots but instead uncovering DSD and his plot, ultimately leading Charlene to the location of DSDs lair.
when I actually started writing the first pass of all the dialogue I shifted away from that idea and decided to have more information inside DSDs lair instead in order to give players some additional backstory that would explain a lot of the missing pieces of the story, such as why Gigantimus is evil and how everyone came back.
It also worked out well for the general flow of the game because finding all the logs would have taken a lot more time than Kyle could have streamed, and DSD wouldn't have been included on stream.
Damian was not part of the plan originally, after you defeated DSD he would have just dumped all the info I put in his logs and then flown away, as I started to actually write it all down I came up with the idea of DSD never talking to Charlene and instead having a conversation with a mysterious group of villains after escaping the battle.
The silhouette of the villains would then resemble a few different characters I didn't already include like Frieda, Jebb and Damian, this was then condensed into just being Damian and I changed the logs a bit to have him be the only apprentice.
This worked out pretty well because I already included BT (his robot buddy) early on so this felt really natural to the existing story.
Damian's mesh is actually a modified DSD model, you can kinda tell by the lower half.
I was constantly rewriting the script as I started implementing it into cutscenes, sometimes I found a better flow for the dialogue or added/removed context or details to set up stuff later in the game, writing isn't really my strongest skill but I think the end result worked well enough and ppl seemed to enjoy it.
Also a fun fact about the music in the DSD dungeon, when brainstorming for ideas I sent Shabello "Hatari" as a reference, I think she did a pretty good job capturing that vibe!
-Crunch and planning-
Last jam I really burned out afterwards and didn't really want to work on games for a while, in order to avoid that I put some ground rules for myself when I started:
First was not starting work on the jam game the second I get home, instead I would just go play some games or watch a show, cook and then once I had destressed a bit from my dayjob I would go work on the jam game, I also stopped working at a reasonable time instead of staying up and depriving myself of sleep.
Second was to lean on my own strengths as a dev more and not try to do something I probably won't be able to deliver on, I make environments for a living, So that's what I focused on for the jam, instead of trying to create advanced combat systems like last time I'd keep the game mechanically simple and create more assets instead.
In general this was probably the saving grace of the game, I was able to convince a friend of mine (Index) to help me out with some of the heavier programming stuff so I could focus on assets and content.
Third was just constant planning and scoping, we kept a Trello board and put everything we had to to there, it really helped us gain perspective on how far we had come at any specific point and how much was left.
There's a lot of stuff I would have like to do differently in hindsight but overall I'm really happy with the final result, and I've learned a lot valuable lessons for future projects.
If you read through all that then thank you for taking the time, this project means a lot to me as I finally created something I feel really proud of without compromise.