Here's the entry link for my jam project, Saturnalia.

This time around, I think I managed to achieve a decent blend of gameplay and aesthetics. Usually my art-heavy games don't have much going on mechanically, so one of my goals here was to try and change that. I can still do better, and will push much harder in that direction in the future, but I think this project helped me understand a mental approach I can take to marrying the art with gameplay.

I worked alone on this one, but used a bunch of tools that I find helpful for jamming. I work in Unity, using SourceTree for git and Photoshop for art. I made pretty heavy use of 2 new features in Unity 2017 - Cinemachine and Timeline, both of which enabled the cinematic feel in Saturnalia. Both are things I want to take a deeper dive into and learn more about now that I've wrapped my head around the basics. Beyond that, I also had my usual group of Unity assets: GoKit, TextMeshPro, ProBuilder, and Unity's post processing stack.

Another new element was that I decided to make my own music. I used an iOS app called Auxy to compose the BGM, which I think turned out pretty well. Auxy is a fantastic tool for making jam music, it's easy to use and since it's on mobile it helped me step away from the computer and do something different for a quick mental break. I'll definitely be using it more in the future!

The concept for this game went from a travel/adventure game, to a motorcycle driving game, to something about train networks, then designing a power grid for a procedural city, then I finally landed on this space-y puzzler. Luckily, all this iteration just occurred on paper over the course of a couple of hours rather than soaking up my dev time. I started out on Friday feeling pretty hopeless about not having a good idea, but after sleeping on it and coming back I ended up with a direction that became one of my favourite LD results.