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)