For this second game jam, me and Tom (with our neatly named collective which now even has a branded splash screen, Half Nibble Games), developed a summoning puzzle game: Eldritch Vessel Academy

You can play directly here, in your browser, no shady download

In this blogpost, I wanna talk about all the things that we did right!

Dare to have dumb ideas

We do the improv thing of "Yes, and" during the brainstorm sessions. In other words, we never shoot any idea down, but instead double down on them. After settling for the idea for the game, our initial demon was a wraith that could go through walls. Tom at some point said "What if one of the devils is a super tiny imp?". I loved the idea! He then expanded with "He can go through tiny holes in walls". At that point I expanded with "Yeah, and we can play heavy metal as soon as he spawns!!". We continued with that and ended up going full overboard, with ideas for applying chromatic aberration + noise and a low-pass filter for the soundtrack as you get mad.

As dumb as this all sounds, the reviews speak for themselves:

No mistakes, only opportunities to learn!

For the previous Ludum Dare, we made two BIG mistakes:

1 - We had an idea that hinged on the ability of implementing multiple different types of a things. 2 - We developed the whole game in pixel art resolution, so when we needed text it was too late to have two viewports.

We conducted a debrief session after the jam and took note of these points in order to prepare better for the next time.

For this Jam, our initial idea was to implement multiple demons you could posses, but ultimately we ended up pivoting to a more polished look n' feel and better level design. Thankfully, during the brainstorm session, we concluded that the game would work with only one demon, so we ended up with a simpler game that was still pretty fun without having to feel like we strayed from the original vision! As for the text, there are comments even praising how the UI looks pretty!

With that, I want people, specially people with a low self-esteem, to not beat themselves up because of mistakes. Nothing teaches a lesson better than making the mistake yourself, so instead of lamenting take note of your mistakes to make sure they won't happen again!

Polish is a feature

Coming from a software engineer background, it might be tempting to simply ignore how games are, first and foremost, an audiovisual medium instead of just software. You play a game to be amazed, not just because it serves a purpose. You will pay for the ugliest freaking tax declaration app if it fixes your problems. The same does not apply to games.

Play your game THOROUGHLY from beginning to end. Identify all rough edges. See how many you can solve in 30 minutes. Solve the highest impacting ones, in order. This goes A LONG WAY to making your game feel right. For this jam, here are a few examples:

• Is the game length correct? Remember, people will be playing more than just your game, so don't make a game that starts too slow or takes 20 minutes to become fun!
• Double checking collision box sizes and shapes to make sure they feel natural
• Making the music play from the title screen into the game instead of making the person hear the first 5 seconds of music twice
• Making sure all z-index are correct so that the player is not clipping through walls at weird angles
• Have some feedback for every action the player does, be it an animation or a sound effect

Committing some time to these tiny nit-picking aspect makes the person playing your game feel like you care and thus makes their sentiment towards the game change from "Damn, it took you 3 days to make this garbage? lol" to "Wow, what a masterfully crafted and well-thought piece software". YMMV, of course lol