An Extra Game Jam Postmortem

I am writing this post mortem to document and share my experience creating The Hero of Meta Cycles for the Extra Credits Game Jam #3

Background

Working in a full time job as a Game Designer I don't usually get a lot of free time and neither "mental energy" to dedicate myself to more development. Luckily, the jam date synced with a holiday here in Brazil, so I decided to participate.

Also, I can't resist to participate in game jams! This is my 7th one so far, so I'm a bit experienced with the whole process. But, because I always jammed with friends, this was my first solo game jam. And man, that sure is different!

Well, these past days I've been talking to a friend on how to improve some abilities, career-wise.  We mapped some stuff, and I decided that the jam would be an action to further improve my skills with Unity, Playmaker, Prototyping and Narrative. This already gave me the necessary constraints to jam really focused, something I really recommend. (This friend would later also be responsible for me not losing the will to continue the jam)

Day 1 - Thursday Night

The jam started and there I was, working on my job. I watched the theme reveal stream while doing tasks. Went home thinking about which angle to tackle the theme. Several ideas, but didn't like any. Too tired to even write stuff down, I went to sleep. 

Progress towards game completion: 1% 
(if you happen to watch Mob Pyscho 100, you get how I am visualizing this hahaha)

Day 2 - Friday

Worked on my job again, letting the theme resonate in the back of my mind and throughout the day I thought of two or three ideas. I asked my friend, who happens to be an artist in my team, for some assets to jam. I said "give me anything you have made and never used before". So he made a pack with some things he had laying around in his drive. Assets for the jam as a diversifier: checked!
But, because I had social events that I couldn't miss, my free night would not be productive. Went back home, then went to sleep. Again.

Progress towards game completion: 4%

Day 3 - Saturday

And now it really begins... right? Well, my mindset wasn't quite on track yet, and I often found myself wanting to procrastinate, and even quit later on this day. But, the same friend from before helped me visualize things, like what was making me wanting to procrastinate in the first place. 

My conclusion was: I am not fluent in making the base of the game, project-wise, so this development friction, that I don't have to deal alone in team jams/projects, demotivates me. With this visualization in mind I could better understand the feeling of procrastination, and this made it easier to focus again and induce work.  So, I began to setup stuff, download and import some plugins from the Unity Asset Store and draft some ideas on paper and on Photoshop.

At the end of the day I had: 

• The story direction (meta-fiction, with quirky characters)
• Draft texts, game flow and UI
• Fungus implemented (with some learning)
• Motivation to continue the jam

However, I was struggling with one major thing: the gameplay design that would envelop the narrative. What would the Lose and Victory conditions be? Do I even have to have these? What should the player aim for while reading stuff? How the characters should progress as the cycles go on? Should I use branched story lines?

All these questions went with me to bed, and sadly I would not have an answer to them until relatively very late in the jam.

Progress towards game completion: 13%

Day 4 - Sunday

I woke up rested and still motivated! Then, I started to work on the game gameplay logic. My rushed decisions for this system were: 

• Characters would have an unique ability, narrative-wise.
  • But, one of them would also have a gameplay-wise ability.
• Characters would have to gather energy to find their magical item.
• At the end of a full cycle, a character would die.

Throughout the day I made several minor changes on how to approach this, things like UI and character code. No need to say that this costed me precious time, time that I could've used later as 3 of those 4 decisions were cut out of the final design.  But anyway, I was in an awesome flow of work and progress was being made!

At the end of the day I had:

• Game Flow logic, using the state-machine of Playmaker.
• Game Manager and Character scripts.
• "Cycles System" UI logic.
• Intro scene on Fungus.
• Found a way to integrate Fungus and Playmaker.

I went to sleep having less than 20 hours to the deadline, and everything needed to be sew together into a cohesive piece of game. At this point I was feeling unstoppable  and sure I would deliver the full game. However, the thing that wasn't crystal clear on my mind was that I didn't even had written 20% of the narrative... of a narrative-based game! D:

Progress towards game completion: 52%

The Final Day - Monday

After waking up and starting my day I was left with less than 12 hours to finish the game. Hard, but achievable!
For this to happen, I revised my scope and finally made good decisions about the gameplay design: I would cut characters abilities, items and interactions with each other. They would be just a narrative path for the player, and each would tell a unique story.

I also decided some measures to be faster, like not revise texts or test every single dialog. I would just make content, looking back as little as possible.

This set me up for the final sprint, my goal, and what I had to do to reach it, was clear. 10 hours of work fled by, without much stops or distractions. Also, shout out to my roommate who ordered some food!! hahaha

In this 10 hours I:

• Refactored some code to accommodate the new design.
  • This consumed 1~2 hours of my precious time.
• Wrote all the 9 conversations for each character, totaling 27 possible conversations.
• Wrote all the End of Cycle conversations and code.
• Wrote the beginning of the Ending Game conversations and code.
• Revised some scenes and texts as I ate some food.
• Built a web version for the Jam, 1 hour before the deadline. 

You can say that pretty much all the playable game was made in this final 10 hours.

As I was uploading the game to the site the exhaustion began to emerge, and I slowly stopped working on the final bit. 

It was done. Not complete, but it was there.

Progress towards game completion: 87%

Conclusion

I didn't delivered in time all the experience I planned, but I'm still proud. Proud of not giving up during the jam, proud of the final design and narrative, proud of learning new stuff. Proud enough to write this piece.

Takeaways

• Understand the reasons why you don't want to do something, rather than just accepting it. My guess is that 80% of the time, your mind is just in the wrong track.
• If you are going to make a narrative-based game, design what is the objective of the narrative first. This way you will spend less time figuring out the systems that are around it.
• If you are solo-jamming, try to talk and show stuff to your friends, even if they aren't participating. It ventilates your ideas and may help with motivation.

Well, that is it. I hope this was a nice and useful read for you :)

See you next time and keep jamming!