I often forget to write a "we did it!" post these days, and I regret that because back on the old website I was hugely enthuisastic in sharing my jam journal. Unfortunately part of my reticence comes from my having moved onto using Unreal, and sharing UE5 gameplay of any tsubstance in the 4MB limited gifs is extraordinarily difficult. I hope someday the imgur embeds work as intended!

Still! I just wanted to chat briefly about The Last Swarm Warden, the game @smartwilliam and I made! It's a light mix of narrative and puzzle, I suppose, but ultimately the goal is to provide a slightly creepy, immersive vibe, using the light of fireflies to guide your way.

I went into this jam with an additional limit on my head. As a gameplay programmer, I've found I most tend toward gameplay-heavy, system-heavy jam games if I can. Something that makes moment-to-moment gameplay satisfying and fun. If possible, that often means combat, too. Most of all, I never made games with a proper level environment to explore, for neither myself nor any of my past LD partners had experience with level design. So, I promised myself this time that I would not do anything with combat, and would try to make something with an actual narrative.

My friend and I took some time to brainstorm every idea we had. Eventually, we workshopped an idea together, in the form of using fireflies to light your way somewhere, with your character being injured. The fireflies would dim, and it was up to the player character to keep them lit. In addition, we wanted the darkness to close in at the end of an area, forcing you to back track without the ability to explore with the fireflies, who would become locked to your position. This is where my friend had the idea to make the player wounded in the story, so as to leave behind a trail of blood to follow on the return journey.

With the idea settled, we set about implementing. Thankfully, the majority of the gameplay systems were done by day one, and that's almost always my goal. The fireflies light was done quickly, though redone slightly on Monday evening. The lever/door system was all quite modular. Indeed, the beacons you encounter to refresh your fireflies were simply another kind of "lever" under the hood, defined as any actor that could be interacted with in close proximity.

Ultimately, I achieved the goals I had with regard to being easier on myself gameplay-wise. If the only responsibility I had was gameplay development, this would have been the easiest jam for a while! And yet, we still had all of the environment to do. In the end, we each took responsibility for a "branch". I'd hoped to have more than two, but over the years you get a good sense for how much you'll ultimately get done.

In the end, it was the level design that really proved the challenge. I am quite terrible at it, and with using the tools to our advantage. But it was a great learning experience, and I'm glad I finally forced myself to try it, because in the end I'm pleased with what we created, that sense of loneliness, and yet... not.

My voicework was hardly my finest, but I'm very proud of the audio I made in general. I had about two hours to make all the audio, write the entire script, record it, and implement the whole thing, but I never let audio go missing from my game. Can't stress enough how important it is!

So there we are! Word salad, but this is The Last Swarm Warden, a game about a priest in a temple of FIreflies - once full of glowing light and warmth, now plunged into darkness, your brothers fallen. There's plenty of superficial metaphor in there, but don't think too hard about it, I'm not terribly clever!

Here's a low quality gif! Blast the 4MB limit! :laughing:

Play it here! Thank you! Please let me know what you thought, if you do!