Packed to the Gills - postmortem (Patreon)

hey sorry i'm late with this postmortem! this was a whirlwind of a game jam so i'm gonna do my best to remember everything that happened in order!!

another team shakeup

jummbus, our usual programmer, was busy traveling over the weekend and couldn't participate in the jam. i was a little worried about taking on the coding helm myself since september had been pretty hectic for me, and there's a lot of limitations as to what kinds of games i can actually make because i really only know the ONE engine... but luckily the idea we came up with was something i was confident i could make with ren'py, and i had A TON OF FUN getting it all working!!

we delegated the art to kc because their style is so perfect for a minimal game like this. they knocked out a ton of little characters and sprites on day 1 and knew exactly how to size them so that it'd be easy for me to implement the assets! thanks kc!!

DonutShoes and HVB handled the audio again. they collabed on the songs--DonutShoes just like, owns a saxophone????? and HVB left space in their composition for DonutShoes to improvise over. it was so neat hearing the songs come together like that!!!!!!!!

chunderfins was only around on day 1 but he gave us the SICKEST LOGO!!!!!!!!! makes me feel like i should step up my logo game for my own projects... (i usually just handwrite my titles because it feels more personal to me that way...)

so yeah that was our team this time!! we all vibed really well in terms of knowing the game we wanted to make... it was really fun being head-down in the coding mines and getting handed great assets to put together. 10/10 experience!!

how it all came together

once the theme of "limited space" was annnounced, kc proposed a game where you try to fit onto a train, and i suggested it should be sardines (because i love disgaea 4).

i don't think we really talked formally about what the exact game design would be, it just felt like we mind-melded or something... it's hard to describe!! i was like "ok i need to create a sequence of directions for the game to spit at you. ok now i need a button that passes on the direction the player pressed. ok now i need to make a timer that passes on a 'miss' if you press nothing." AND THEN IT ALL JUST WORKED... it was awesome haha.

^early screenshot from when the game showed a text command and we didn't have the pose buttons yet. it showed a little success/miss pop up and kept you posed in the last direction you pressed.

i spent friday night coding that core gameplay loop, but there was no plan for what to do with the story yet! so i went to bed thinking about it. kc had already drawn a ton of assets, and it didn't seem like they'd be good to reuse as character busts for a typical vn. so i was thinking what we could do to have minimal art, and thought about doing like a little fishy diary entry between levels... and then i realized they could just be haikus since that fit with the jam's theme!!

each of us wrote at least 3 of the haikus--i did a lot of the tutorial-ish ones since i was handling a bunch of game design stuff already. all the extra ones we didn't need for the main story get shown randomly when you start one of the bonus modes! (each mode has its own pool of 4 haha)

feature creep (positive)

i wanted the levels to get harder as you went, so we decided on having 2 buttons in level 1 (up/down), 4 buttons in level 2 (all directions), and a special gimmick for level 3 (the jellyfish). coding the jelly was the hardest part!!! at first the only way i could get it working was to have it board the train in place of you so you'd catch the next one. in my head i was like, "oh god i have to make all these other variables to check for like "share_up" "share_left" etc..." but when i thought about it saturday night, i realized i could just use "share" like i had been, and then change it to a direction before jumping back to the train loop. there's also the added complexity of needing to show the jelly in different spots on the train... im just glad i was able to get it working as intended by the end omg, but it was definitely the most brain-hurty part of coding this system!!

we also had the blocked trains (which just return a "miss")--those were originally introduced in endless mode after you "beat" the game because we weren't sure if we'd have time to do a song to even HAVE a level 4. but HVB really pulled through!! im glad for it too, because the "main story" bit felt too short when i was testing it out. having the one extra level and getting to explain/hint the mechanic really rounded out the already-short experience.

when we were originally planning the difficulty curve, i thought an easy way to do it would be to make the timer shorter as you got to later levels, but this turned out to not really be necessary! but i still wanted to use the idea, so the very last feature i added was rush hour mode! it changes the timer from 3 seconds to 1, with the added difficulty of needing to get 100 trains correct in a row. i don't think i ever beat it legitimately... but i did end up getting to 213 cars in endless before we released the game!

by sunday afternoon the game was basically done (excluding final music assets) so i ended up doing a bunch of "stretch goal" type-work that evening, like adding gamepad support. kc made a web build that night so we could test it out, since i had never done a web build before. shockingly, it worked SUPER WELL!!! ren'py web has really come a long way! the first version was slightly buggy, but when we changed the images to preload instead of the progressive load option (which kc knew how to do so i didn't have to figure anything out!) it ran perfectly.

i hadn't been necessarily planning on doing a mobile build, but i did make sure to design the screens in a way that it would be possible to do a touch version! like you can click/tap the jelly if you don't have spacebar, and i changed the haikus for the touch version to give you appropriate instructions. the last thing i did for the game was change the mobile UI from the default stuff to make sure everything displayed basically the same on both versions (give or take some buttons in the options menu).

oh, as a final note, i left all the files unarchived so you can actually look at the code yourself in the download version! if my explanations above were hard to follow, maybe it'd help to see the scripts (most of it is in myscreens.rpy!). i keep thinking about how i can reuse this code for my own games and i have a few ideas, so maybe you can expect more of this type of thing in the far off future~

our game is a little bit viral

at the time of writing this, we have over 200 ratings on our ludum dare page!! i think having a web version really makes a difference, since having to download the games puts up a slight barrier... the amount of feedback is amazing!!!!!! i've actually been avoiding reading all the comments this time because i know that to a point it's not really good for my mental health to keep checking them, but im glad everyone seems to be having a great time with it.

i really love doing game jams and felt SUPER ENERGIZED the whole weekend ;o; i think only now that it's out i feel worn down and need to withdraw from the social side of things... i've been having fun playing other jam entries though. windowkill by torcado is especially neat!

one of the reasons i'm posting this a few days late is because we have a friend staying with us this week, so i'm sort of on vacation right now! getting lots of needed rest and time away from my usual obligations :) thanks for your patience and understanding, i think i'll write another dev diary next week talking more about mental health stuff since it's been on my mind a lot. ANYWAY, glad i got to jam with the moonlight jammers again, and i look forward to the next ludum dare in april!!

thanks for reading <3