Our First Game

Hi, I'm Twilight

I'm the leader of this particular project. This was not only my first gamejam, but my first completed game. I wanted to start by giving you a bit of history on me.

I've had a love of video games for my entire life, and have had a complicated relationship with artistic creation for just as long. I recently came to the conclusion that I could no longer avoid bearing my heart to the world, and I had a deep desire to Make Things.

So for the past few months, I've taken what was once half hearted attempts at learning programming, and instead launching myself headfirst into the difficult art of making computers do the things you want. I've allowed myself to make bad pixel art. I've put more of myself into writing than ever before... and most importantly, I committed to actually releasing something. With the help of my teammates, we put our all into this. And given that my journey started properly only two months ago? I think we're on a good trajectory.

Hi, I'm Krysta!

Most of what's below already covers my experience with the project as well, even though it's written in Twilight's voice as the "I" of the post. But it seemed only right to at least include a bit of my history as well. This has been... an experience for me. Entirely too many years ago, I went to school for this. Spent an awful lot of money on a program that slammed us with the basics of coding in a number of different languages, while only really managing to relate that to the creation of web apps for businesses, rather than the sort of design I really wanted to get in to. Not too long after, the need to pay for things beat out the desire to create and I contented myself playing games rather than making them. So when it came up as a possibility to learn and do this as part of the team... My heart wouldn't let me not do it. And now that we have, I'm burning in a way I haven't in a very long time. My pen runneth over with ideas for the next thing, and how I might polish it further without the race to learn and create on a jam's tight deadline. Still looking forward to the next one though. This was an experience I'm going to treasure.

I'm Bitblush! 

Erika's fine, too. I'm the composer for this game, and while this isn't my first time making music for someone, this is my first time properly **scoring** something. Going in, I was very anxious. I fly by a philosophy of "I'm still learning, it doesn't matter if it doesn't come out good!" But that was much harder with this project, now that I had someone relying on me.

General Thoughts:

We went through a lot of potential ideas for what might have been fun to build on. And we had a lot more ideas for this than we were able to fit in. This was an exercise in doing what we could with what we had, making hard decisions on what was really the most important elements of the game, and finding pivot points when things weren't working out.

Our entire first day was spent brainstorming. We started with simple ideas, coming up with maybe 2 dozen ideas, most of which were incredibly basic. Then we started fleshing ideas out, seeing if we had more than just a blurb like "Spreading the word". After that, we just went through each idea and gauged our interest level via vibes. One of my ideas, "Protagonist Syndrome" where player control spreads from player to environment, got riffed on with the opposite by Krysta, "Antagonist Syndrome" where the world became more and more hostile as you played, and the more we looked at other ideas, we realized not only was it the one that called to us the most, but it was the one that was simple enough we believed we could deliver.We absolutely allowed our scope to creep at this point, mostly in the form of... daydreaming. We just thought about all the things that were important, all the things we needed to have, and how we wanted to do the story. After discussing it, we settled on the idea that everything is becoming more hostile because of an entity called "The Algorithm", an idea born of our mutual distaste for current algorithmic content sorting that prioritizes nothing but monetary value.

After we had decided on the what, we settled on the idea of 'spreading the word' through social media as a mechanic, and quickly made a prototype. During this time, I began working on the game design document. I prioritized all the systems that needed to be made before we could design any levels. Due to fighting with time constraints and energy constraints, it took a bit longer than liked, so we ended up needing to cut a few larger concepts (the world 'spreading' back in time as things get worse, the idea of being able to take a selfie to drag enemies around, differentiating the enemies to make it clearer what 'chirps' would be effective, etc). And after playtesting ourselves and spreading it around... it rapidly became clear that the only way to get our levels to work with the mechanics we had been able to create was to focus the dialogue as heavily as possible.

The entire time we worked, we went back and forth between rapid prototyping and polishing mechanics we felt were working. We gave our musician, BitBlush, quite the hard time, as we took a long time to be able to really solidify the mood to base the music on.

I asked for some vacation time on the last couple days of the jam, and was thankfully granted it. The levels were actually only finished up in the last couple days.

It was a stressful experience, relying on others, others relying on me, and making the difficult decisions necessary to make the game come to life. I know I'll do this again, for sure.

Successes:

• We kept scope in check: We developed core systems first, and prioritized underdeveloped systems. We playtested the mechanics often, and shared the work with friends whenever we could. 9 total prototypes were uploaded over the course of the jam, each one with more and more dramatic changes.
• We stayed true to our vision: While we had to cut some concepts out of our initial thoughts, we absolutely kept the core of what sparked our interest, and built on it effectively.
• We stepped outside of our comfort zone: None of us are horror enthusiasts, and while we love video games in general, we were all willing to do what felt best for the jam. We came up with what we felt was a novel idea worth exploring, and dedicated ourselves to it.
• We pivoted correctly: The initial idea involved more maze-like levels, but when we realized our AI system was a little too basic as late as we were into the jam, we pivoted to a dialogue and exploration focus, and this worked out well for the final product
• We learned so much: So much. I learned about being a project lead and the sorts of sacrifices you need to make to keep true to vision. I learned about my weaknesses in communication and how to better convey intent to team members. We all learned our own respective crafts more, I know more about programming now than I ever have, and I intend to keep at it.

Setbacks (but not failures):

• We definitely needed to spend more time going back and forth between playtesting and prototyping, and deciding on our base mechanics with more clarity. The pivots could have been less severe had we really hammered in exactly what our AI needed to do earlier in the project.
• None of us had much experience with level design. Understanding that time spent tinkering with your 'toolbox' and time spent using your toolbox need some segmentation was vital for getting the levels out at the last minute like we did, when we committed to not changing our system any further and using what we had, somehow levels became so much easier to make. But because levels were made so late, we got very little time to playtest.
• Playtesting process: We desperately needed a more formalized playtesting process, we needed more clarity for what we were asking from anyone who played our game, and we needed to be able to playtest ourselves more effectively. Perhaps being more careful about scheduling time for people to play, and having them stream it to us, would have been more valuable. Whatever the case was, while we playtested often and did learn a lot, actually getting information we could use back was challenging.
• Design Document: This was my first time ever writing one. I feel I did... passably. But I know a bit more now about the process and what's realistic to estimate at, in terms of time, and what needs to be figured out. In the future, I know to update it more regularly with any additions, and also at the start, to not only define the general vision, but to really hammer in more of the specific ideas you want to accomplish, because levels can't be made until your ideas are tangible to work with.

Closing

We all learned a lot, and we all got in touch with our spirit of creation. It's a fragile, vulnerable thing that you have to protect with all your might... or at least, that's how it feels. Our composer had something to say on this, and I want to leave you with her words:

This message is for people out there who are scared about whether or not they 'can' or 'can't' draw, or play music... Any craft, really. It's especially to the Erika seven years ago, who graduated high school thinking she "couldn't draw." I only really decided to learn music about two years back, and to this day I'm still using the same freeware, hand-me-downs, and whatever online resources I could find as a young adult who could never afford college or classes. I hope this message finds someone just like me, who lives feeling that they don't have any talents.

I had a difficult time with my part. I spent days and days iterating on Algorithm, and felt like I could still do it 'better.' It did drive me up the wall trying to figure out how to make it longer, more interesting, more captivating. Enough so that the rest of the soundtrack suffered being stuck as short loops.

That feeling was a very powerful drive, at the start. It helped me lower my guard enough to ask some of my friends for feedback, to learn a bit from them, and that was what really helped elevate my work. Turns out, my friends had resources and were willing to share for me admitting I had no idea what to do. It led to one of my proudest solo works yet. But still... I felt like I could still do better.

This takes us to the last day before launch. I'm frantically trying to add more to the song, remove things, mess with the new tools I'd learned how to use... I cried the night before publishing. But when I'd calmed down, I realized that I was already over the finish line. It was messy. it was scrappy. But it was mine, and my team enjoyed it.

I could follow up with every little thing I see wrong with my work. It's short, doesn't loop cleanly, the slap bass is repetitive, the melody meanders around in the third part... but my friend, a more seasoned musician, told me something surprising. "Make bad songs fast." It's better to finish a piece and learn from it, than to wait until you know what you're doing before you continue. My ego had made the song "sacred" to me, and I felt like I was wasting its potential.

A friend of mine that helped teach me music told me something very important once. "It's natural, healthy even, to be a little scared." I think I finally get what she means now. When you honestly, sincerely try at something, you put your ego into it. Your hungry, scrappy ego, out on your sleeve where it can be hurt, or even broken. It's really scary! And, I dont think it ever stops being scary. I think it'd be a bad thing if I *wasn't* a little scared.

I understand now that that feeling is investment. It's a reminder that I care, and that I want this enough that I would be hurt if things didn't go okay. The difference between people who make things and people who don't... It's not anything to do with talent, or resources, or even experience.

No. The ONLY difference is how you want to respond to that feeling, and how well you handle it when things don't turn out how you want. I like to think that, once you've learned this feeling, and learned to live with it, everything else is just a consequence. Now that I've had a taste of it, I'm happy to continue my work knowing that this is the "worst" I'll ever be again.