You can play and rate my jam entry here! (I'm sort of spoiling it in the article)

Well there it is! Several LDs after I first vowed to join, I finally got to work on my own compo project. My name is Kyrio, I make AI for strategy games as a day job and I've been devising game ideas and engine prototypes for a few years now. While I've long been interested in the making of games, I'm still quite new to game dev itself.

A Binding Contract stems from a concept I came up with in the week before LD44: solving puzzles by using the properties of random objects you find around a house. I think this is a great way to prepare for a jam, especially when, like me, you haven't prepared anything else: find the type of game you want to make, and hopefully you'll figure out a connection to the theme. And I did just that on Saturday morning: if the idea is to bind objects together, what if "life" was the glue that made two inanimate items work together? What if you could take the life off one mechanism and use it to build something else? Would that, uh... work on humans?

I had the connection, and a setting grim enough to fit your initial reaction to the theme. Exciting times! So, did everything go right? Nah. While I'm pretty proud of the presentation of my game, it is mostly just a prototype, highlighting the main mechanic rather than really letting you play with it. But there's a lot to learn here, even things that might seem obvious to most jammers.

Let's find some key lessons:

• Prepare! It was fun to go it alone and unprepared, but I lost valuable time either trying to do stuff I had never done before (music with Bosca Ceoil, which I eventually scrapped) or setting up my codebase. I wrote a bit of Lua code in the beginning as I wanted to use LÖVE, a framework I'm pretty fond of, but I soon fell back to Construct 2 to have a working prototype quickly ready. HTML5 is great when you want people to try your game.
• Design! I can't stress this enough. I had my idea, a plan, and after a relaxed start I knew I had to focus on assets. I'd draw furniture and figure out how to interact with it along the way, I thought; what a fun creative process! Don't do that. By the time I was implementing the gameplay, I realized I could only add a few interactions, and none of those I had thought about were intuitive or exciting enough. This almost made me quit.
• Don't, uh... polish that much? I don't know. I can't help myself, even when I'm running late on everything else. I knew I couldn't push the idea very far in a jam, but I wanted my entry to be a teaser of what the game could be. So of course I wouldn't cut the intro, but the UI took more time than I should've allowed. Ask my colleagues if I spend release weeks tweaking the CSS of our debug tools! (I do)

But there's a few good things too:

• Art. Limiting myself to the Game Boy palette and scale felt a bit tedious, but in hindsight I think it helped this pixel art novice focus, and the uniform style gives a nice quality boost. It was exciting to get positive feedback on that aspect!
• Taking decisions. Though I was planning to have more content than that, I'm happy to see I managed to limit the scope of the project as I saw the clock ticking. Mainly, I came up with the point-and-click system because I knew I couldn't spend more time on assets, let alone a walking character.
• Concept. I still like the idea, and especially the lore that appeared when I confronted it with the theme. I eventually stuck to my initial "house mess" setting and got rid of the LIFE meter, but I do regret it. I think there's a lot to do with the mechanic of stealing LIFE from something (or someone) in order to build something else, and a whole game world to imagine around that.

Eventually, I didn't feel like publishing what I had for the compo, so on the next day, I took a few "jam" hours after work to fix some issues and code the ending event. And thus came A Binding Contract, a prototype with a lot of polish and promise, at the expense of things to do in it. Releasing something feels very good, even after a few disappointments, and I'm positive it'll help for the next time. Thanks for reading!