I made two games this time around, We Trust You Are Well We Trust You Are Well as a solo entry and Chomp Radio with @alexrose and @sinclairstrange. I almost always START a solo project, but it's been 6 years since the last time I actually finished one. My goal is to prioritize the team game and only finish a solo entry if there's time.

We Trust You Are Well

I built my solo entry in React, using Zustand for state management. I've wanted to figure out a text-centric puzzle mechanic for a while, and figured doing a glorified webpage would be the way to go. It's all text and sliders. Text can blur. Text can turn into links. End of feature list. But you can build a lot with those concepts, and I feel like I only scratched the surface. The basic theme of distrust and manipulating others' words felt like an effective way of making those simple mechanics feel more impactful.

The core mechanic of the game is that fragments of text can be revealed to provide clues or story hints that you can uncover as you go. Sometimes completing a task or collecting an item unlocks text. Sometimes putting sliders into certain positions unblurs important info. It took quite a bit of sorting out to write a custom markdown parser that would allow me to define visibility states based on all three slider positions as well as provide triggers for collecting items or completing checkpoints. I had a 3-axis coordinate system that would blur and unblur text based on how close the sliders were to target values. Each piece of text could be set to require specific values from any combination of the 3 axes, which allowed text to be connected together and make it feel like you were calibrating with three different sliders. It was a mess to get working correctly, but eventually I got there.

Poorly compressed gif

I'm glad I finished this enough to put out, but it definitely missed the mark in a bunch of areas. At one point I built a full 2D maze at one point, but scrapped it because it didn't QUITE work. But it would be cool to figure out some more "traditional" gameplay to go along with the rest. I wish I had figured out a bit more of the playspace with these mechanics and didn't rush the entire narrative into the last 90 minutes of the jam. I got to some sort of narrative conclusion, but it definitely ends just as things start to make sense and I threw a bunch of random nonsense in at the end to try to show conditional text display and whatnot. All told, I feel like I got ENOUGH of the idea out to let it stand on its own. I may or may not try expanding on things in the future.

Chomp Radio

This is our Snake/Bullet-hell/Tower-offense game. You can upgrade individual segments of your snake, slide around procedurally generated levels, and face off against an ambitious number of enemy types with an ambitious number of weapon options.

I was on audio for the team game (as per usual). It took some time to figure out the musical vibe, and landed somewhere in the ballpark of metal meets Invader Zim. I broke my wrist in September and I'm still kinda struggling with my fretting hand, so this took a lot more practice time to get to a recordable state than a lot of my previous soundtracks. All told, I'm happy with the results. Action games are tough to write for because you need things to be present, energetic, and have some melodic hooks. But they also feel like they can fade into the background a bit so they're not fighting for attention the whole time. I feel like I was able to get the vibe and add a few melodic hooks while also staying out of the way.

Alex also did a chunk of voice acting for this to kind of riff on a Metal Gear parody (our character is a snake, after all). So on top of music and sound effects I had to do the old VA slice-and-dice. It was a lot smaller scope compared to some of our previous games, but we still ended up with over 150 lines of dialogue that I processed. We only ended up with a portion of those in the game, but being able to process things so that we had options in the final build was important. For bulk editing, Audacity's tagging system is incredibly intuitive. I could tag and name all the takes we needed and then have real-time eq, compression, and such applied while exporting to .ogg. Cleaned, processed, small files with (relatively) minimal effort.

Atmo Out

Go give either of the games a play and let us know what you think.