styzino was the one with the idea, "Let’s join a game jam!"

Five unsuspecting, (very) inexperienced game developers banded together and entered GoedWare’s 12th game jam.

The team consisted of whatitch700, styzino, singalingading, LycheeSoda and myself. Out of the 5, only whatitch700 had made a game. The rest of us were blindly going in, oblivious to the despair that would come at the pointy end of a game jam :D

In terms of skills and experience, whatitch700and styzino have programming backgrounds, I have an art background, LycheeSoda plays a lot of games, was interested in sound and a bit of programming, and singalingading was there for the learning and brought good vibes.

This reflection is a little long, so here's a breakdown of what I cover:

• Our ideation process
• Tools we used
• Reflections on the jam itself
• The game itself
  • Minigames
  • Audio/ sound effects
  • Dialogue
  • Visual Theme
• An artist's reflections

Our ideation process

Ideating is most efficient when done individually, but most effective when done with collaborative conversation.

‘Strange Power Ups’ was a broad theme for the jam. The power up could be strange by its affect on game play, or affect on UI/HUD, or something totally left field that we haven’t considered. As part of the ideation process, we agreed that power ups could range from being beneficial, negative or neutral. We were interested in the idea of stacking power ups, or being able to cycle through them.

Below are screenshots of our team’s very early ideas:

Tools we used:

• Godot - we used godot 4.3 as our game engine purely because whatitch700 had used it before and he’s the only one with game design experience! 
• Trello - tasking and kanban board
• Miro - our digital whiteboard to ideate and collaborate in real time
• Google Docs - collaborate on long form, written ideation, such as dialogue
• Local NAS - sharing and upload files
• Discord - for messaging and voice chat

Reflection about the jam itself

This was a rewarding but difficult experience. Seeing our limits get pushed creatively and (sadly) physically together with friends is an experience I think we will reminisce fondly after some much needed sleep.

During the last few hours of the jam, whatitch700 and styzino were furiously coding spaghetti to pull our game together. Between the two of them, they probably clocked over 90 hours of coding over the final three days of the jam…

Meanwhile, LycheeSoda, singalingading and I were awaiting a game to test!

Miro and Discord were two tools that were very helpful in communicating our bugs/ feedback.

Miro enabled the team to screenshot specific bugs and for whatitch700 and styzino to move items they completed across in real time.

The game itself

The game is a office simulator game, where the player can talk to colleagues, play 4 minigames twice a day, do tasks in order to earn enough points to remain hired by the end of the 5 days. Each day is 90 seconds if you don’t do anything that pauses the time component of the game. Talking to colleagues and playing minigames will cause time to progress by various amounts depending on who you talk to, and how well you do in the minigame.

A core mechanic of our game is that each day is the same gameplay. The ‘fun-ness’ or replayability of the game is a tiiiny bit lacking in my opinion. This could have been addressed if we had the luxury of testing the game for more than an hour or so before submitting the game. Part of this could have been attributed to how broad our game’s scope was, especially for a jam of this size.

A nice to have would be a testable game at least 24 hours before the jam was due. No clue how we would have been able to do that with the same scope. Assets, sounds, navigation and interactables needed to be coded together before we had a playable game, which understandably took a long time! Our first exported 'testable' game was finalised 6 hours before the initial midnight deadline, and you bet it was riddled FULL of bugs and errors. As an observer to the coding, it felt like 60% of the code was pulled together on the last day.

Minigames

The puzzle game is our weakest link. Whatitch700 doesn’t like the puzzle game very much. He thinks it detracts from the enjoyment of the game. Unlike the other games which are either actioned for you (ie the rhythm game and the client game) or are fast paced (ie the file sorting game), the puzzle game play is static. The pacing of the game detracts from all the other elements that are built within other elements of the game. Coding the drag and drop functionality was “janky” and not as simple as it might seem. This game caused whatitch700 the most grief and if we had the luxury of time, we probably would have replaced this mini game with something else.

Audio/ Sound effects

Things that really made the game come together were sound effects and the dialogue after doing a task (ie picking up boxes, using the printers etc). LycheeSoda used Audacity, AudioRelay, his phone as a microphone. He followed advice from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kux_LvRl57U

Dialogue

In general, I think many satisfying games have some way of communicating to the player that you have done an action either correctly or incorrectly. Effective ways of doing that are either visually (eg flashing, changing color), aurally (ie sound effects that correspond to the action), or via text (where you tell, not show). The dialogue after actioning tasks was a decision at 8pm on Monday night - the last day of the jam. Having the dialogue after actioning tasks was the final piece of the puzzle which I think really tied the game together and made doing the tasks rewarding.

There’s actually a decent amount of dialogue/ text boxes within the game. I think it’s unfortunate that the pacing of the game limits the player to interact with colleagues and the special NPCs, who have more dialogue coded in. So I encourage if you’ve managed to get the two endings, talk to the colleagues more!

Visual Theme

I wanted a 2.5D style game, mixed with hand-drawn elements and I was inspired by visual novel games - I wanted our special NPCs to be fun to draw! 

By creating and designing the UI,  I was able to visually tie the hand-drawn food elements, the HUD and the special NPCs together better than if we purchased a pre-made set (which is what we wisely did for the pixel art),

To stick to the office theme, I sought inspiration from the Microsoft Office suite - specifically PowerPoint and Teams. The references to this can be seen in the food cards (like a pptx slide) and in the text UI - the colors are taken from the Teams layout :')

An artist’s reflections

To draw the art, I used Procreate on iPad and Photoshop on my laptop to edit colors afterwards. I chose Procreate because it was portable, and transferring files to my mac via airdrop was very convenient. In hindsight, I wish I created directly on my laptop/ desktop for reasons I'll touch on.

I haven’t made too much digital art in the past, so this process was definitely a journey and a learning experience. I tried my best to use the capabilities of digital art, like layers and blending modes to speed up my process. I also edited Procreate's default round brush to suit my preferences. I did like how on the iPad, I'm able to draw directly on the screen. If I drew on my laptop/ desktop, I would have to use my screenless drawing tablet, which feels less intuitive.

One problem I kept running into was the color calibration between my iPad and laptop. The colors I was choosing on my ipad were quite green. After transferring finished files to my laptop, I needed to edit the assets a quite a lot through Photoshop. Thankfully, most of the problems could be fixed by bumping up the red using the curves functionality.

Another element that I need to fix in future drawings when drawing on my iPad is using more saturated colours. For whatever reason, I gravitated towards using quite de-saturated colours. I think the bright screen on the iPad artificially boosted the saturation of the colours I chose and I had to spend a bit of time trying to increase the saturation in Photoshop.

Designing the characters was an enjoyable experience. I started with a rough description of the character's personality and fleshed out their features based off their imagined personality and their sprite design. This was the case with the boss, the assistant and the blonde hair character. The blue haired character was a last minute addition, as he was the character who gave you the rhythm minigame. He had no personality backing his design, only his sprite.

One thing that worked out in my favour was determining the game’s dimensions early on. I made sure to draw everything on the pre-determined 1920 x 1080 canvas. This allowed me to prevent assets having too much or too little detail as they were appropriately sized across all of the assets.

My run of how to optimise how to win the game

In my hour or so of testing the game, I think I have optimised a run for the game. In my opinion, I think dairy is the best food powerup. Tiramisu is the best food item as it has dairy, alcohol and sugar. Sugar allows the player to navigate the map faster, and alcohol has positive benefits on the client meeting game, and the file sorting game. If I have the blue cheese option, I would eat that and make sure to talk to the boss for some extra points. Also, NPCs move out of your way because you ate a food with a strong odour.

In my testing, the quickest way to fill the quota for the week is to navigate the map like shown below, making sure to talk to as many colleagues as possible. I would always do the puzzle minigame at the beginning of the run but then never do it after as it took too long.

Thank you for reading and trying the game!

I'll be posting video about my game jam experience on my youtube later in October: https://www.youtube.com/@vonyongdotcom