And a postmortem from the technical side

UPD

I suddenly discovered that the post is displayed AT FULL HEIGHT. So I moved the rest of the images to the comments to avoid squatting the main page

First of all, a huge thanks to everyone who sweated over drawing those suspect portraits! Your crazy skills (literally crazy!) are absolutely stunning. Well, almost all of them. Some are complete garbage. Either way, I think you (like us) would find it interesting to look through the submissions. So ENJOY.

I'll admit, I'm surprised by how few blank sheets there were! Especially since at first we didn't restrict submitting sheets without drawings at all. Wow, just incredible!

This was a great ludum! The second one our team decided to take part in. Almost the same crew, and by a happy coincidence in the same place as a year ago.

Getting together in one space and making a game for 18 hours a day over three days is incredible luck and a real luxury. I hope everyone gets to experience something like that someday.

This time we worked more consciously. If last year we just wanted to make something beautiful and polished, this time we set ourselves a serious goal - MAKE SOMETHING THAT ACTUALLY FEELS LIKE A GAME.

There were fuckups. There was real drama and moments of despair. Initially we decided to make a game about controlling an alien (via a probe up the ass, yeah yeah) ragdolling a human through a complex control panel. But by the end of the first day we realized we couldn't pull it off. Mostly technical problems (I couldn't get Spine to work with Box2D - first time trying that in a jam). But the concept had some flaws too. First and foremost: "how the hell do you make the gameplay interesting." I suspected the physics would do the work for us again, but at the point we were at, it was a completely un-jam-friendly format.

So we started thinking hard and only garbage ideas came out. The word of that day was MECHANIC. Every idea was met with the question "what exactly is the mechanic here?". And if the answer contained the stop-word "minigames", the idea was mercilessly cut.

Late evening, the mood pretty grim. Sadness, shame, despair. And then suddenly, literally within half an hour, everything flips upside down. We all realize there's potential in this identikit drawing idea and start grinding, trying to make up for the lost day.

Yeah, unfortunately we didn't manage to make the game to its full extent. The way we originally imagined it. At some point I was left almost without a partner and had to cut, simplify, be stubborn and say NO WE'RE NOT DOING THAT AND THAT'S FINAL.

But I'm incredibly happy that we still managed to catch that abstract, almost unreachable FUN and put those smoldering memories of it into the game.

Usually I start to get sick of games I make (though the jam format softens that a bit). But not this time! I think it's because every time I hit the fax button, I was genuinely curious to see what the players had drawn. There's some gameplay potential in this kind of indirect gameplay / real interaction with other players that I find really interesting.

Anyway, great jam, historic shit. Thanks to everyone who played, thanks to everyone who participated, and the biggest thanks to those who gave us a chance to resurface from the routine and believe in ourselves again. To remember why I got into games in the first place.

Yeah, here's the link to the game, in case you missed it:

Almost the Same