某 SA Game Jam 作品开发复盘：我是如何制作这款游戏的

Firstly, a big thank you to everyone who's played the game, left a comment or review, made a playthrough or interacted with the game in any way. I've absolutely loved reading all the responses and thoughts and kind words - thank you kindly, has brought me a lot of joy ❤️🙏

Over on the Makers Massive Discord which hosted the SA Game Jam, Raptor asked a question to the group "I would love to hear more people's break downs/ retrospectives / stories about their jams. What were you trying to do, what did you learn, what did you enjoy?"

I thought about this for a while and started jotting down some things, which ended up becoming this post. This might not be that interesting to many and is extremely self-indulgent, and it's defs using a different part of my brain than I used to make the game, but writing it here because why not. Doing something like a game jam in such a short time requires 'heating up an element' and that element has cooled down a bit since.

Off the bat I loved the theme 'People Watching' - I was originally planning on doing something to do with characters off Plett locals before the theme was announced, I think after listening to Jonathan Hua-Yoon's podcast with Julia Smuts Louw about his and Free Lives latest game DressMaker (which has been a roaring success), he reminded me (and the listeners) about how personal stories are valuable, and I learned about the 'star-shaped game' where someone can lean into their strengths and not worry too much about their weaknesses, so I was feeling good about taking a leaf from that, the timing of hearing that message was right, it lit a little ✨flame✨ inside me and I internalised it. I was also possibly going to jam with 2 friends, Julia and Pete, but they both forgot it was school holidays that weekend and both had plans with their families, so I decided to embrace the simplicity of a solo jam.

Soon as the jam started I was like 'Well, I'm just gonna trust the process and follow this thing wherever it goes and try to enjoy it' so without any writing, planning or roughs I started drawing stuff in Photoshop and had pretty much all the visuals after the first night. I was rushing a bit because I didn't know if I'd have Sunday and Monday to work on this since my birthday was coming up and I had plans for those days. Didn't really have a bird's eye view of the plan, but because things were following some internal compass,  the navigation was pleasant. And I knew if I kept going with doing the next thing, then the next, then the next etc. and keeping the time in mind, we'd get there. 

Technical

Used the Adventure Creator plugin in Unity, a plugin I've used since my first point & click game and have learned the ropes by now. Drew everything in Photoshop with my Wacom Cintiq 22"HD on my Mac Mini M4. Did all the backgrounds in one Photoshop file (each bg was in its own group, exported to PNGs for Unity), and the character in another Photoshop file. I set up an import preset for Unity that imported images as single and not multiple images, which saved me some time. NPCs were in their own Photoshop file, I put them at the bottom of the canvas so I could make their pivot at the bottom of their sprite, it helps with layer sorting in Adventure Creator. Was pretty quick to iterate with both Photoshop and Unity open at the same time. Kept everything 1920x1080 grayscale because it's easier not having to think about colour and just keeping things monochromatic, and it has a kind of rough storyboard / animatic feel, and suits the surreal tone pretty well I think.

I didn't have a script and just wrote the dialogue in Adventure Creator's ActionLists, making stuff up as the process unfolded. 

For sound, I've been keeping a library of sound packs I collect, many of them I got during Humble Bundle sales. I tried a LOT of different options and found the Ovani Environmental 2 pack ambient tracks worked well, so I used those.  I have like 31gb of Ovani audio on my external HD. They're great for game jams. For the footsteps, I found some other long footstep tracks, possibly also Ovani but they could have been Free to Use Sounds perhaps, another huge selection I got on sale prob during a Black Friday sale or something. I found a couple sounds I liked and isolated the footsteps for those. The other misc sound effects were nearly all or mostly Ovani. 

For the voices, I tried human sounds but they got repetitive really fast, so instead used a small innocuous UI sound and edited it in Audacity to loop nicely, had one for the player character and another one for all other NPCs.

Use the Override feature to bring the quality of the sound down to something like 40% for WebGL to keep the web export file size down enough to make it quick to load in the browser.

The font is 'Lacquer' - again, I hunted for a while before landing on this font, which struck the right punky tone.
Lacquer is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

Even More Thoughts? Phwoar

Another game of mine (Bru & Boegie: Episode 1) was about to take part in a 'Punk Games Showcase' on Steam and I thought 'PUNK' is a great vibe to go for, so I wanted to do something punky and also gentle. Wasn't trying to say something big or profound or controversial or do social commentary,  the game feels weirdly personal; originally when the player enters the manhole to the sewer I originally had him saying something like 'This look like a good place to enter the unconscious' and that's kind of what this game experience is I suppose. I didn't have any distractions while I was working at my comp (no music or podcasts or audiobooks on in the background) and think that helped me be able to bypass the logical and reasoning / rationalising part of the brain and get a little deeper into a rich symbolic / metaphor territory, where the emptiness is rich in itself. It's as surface-level or as rich as a person allows I suppose.

Submitted the finished game on Saturday night, and then because at least 2 peeps mentioned in the comments/ratings that they missed having audio, spent some of Sunday night and a fair bit of Monday doing audio (and some more anims, polish and bug fixes). I initially regretted doing the audio since I was eating into my actual birthday and it took some fiddling to find the right tone, but ultimately glad for it, I think it helps set the tone and mood without being overbearing.

Yeh. Felt like 'being open on the operating table' and then seeing the process through, getting stitched up at the end, and enjoying the thing afterwards and seeing what it is. Like being pregnant I guess, but with a creative ball of something, giving birth, release it into the world, and then onwards we go. One of the benefits of a time limit (and I suppose not having to refer to software user manuals or ask AI questions) is that there's not much chance to second-guess or over-rationalise stuff, more of a direct line between brain and result, and one can't OVER-optimise where it's not necessary, the mess doesn't seem as much of a mess once it's wrapped.

There was a level of 'hang on, if I can do this in a day, why did I just spend a year making a demo for another game (Bru & Boegie: Episode 2) that isn't markedly better than this?' and I don't quite know the answer to that question, other than the long project took a lot of planning and following some kind of external map and it was a tough slog, and this short jam was far more intuitive and followed some internal compass. Maybe two sides of the same coin / both need each other? I defs learned a lot making B&B Ep2 that I think helped me make this game without needing to guess how to do certain things, and keep things nice 'n simple.

I try not post-mortem too much (otherwise I can and will obsess), because each time the process and conditions are different and can rarely be recreated, and I think it's a mistake to attribute too much of success or failure to oneself, there are often a lot of other factors involved outside of one's control! Also, I can spend time trying to extract meaning from a meaningless void, and there's a beauty in the void.

Seems like the game's been received well! It got onto the front page of itch.io for ‘Fresh’ and it's still near the top in some categories:

Thanks for reading / thanks for giving me your time. ❤️

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