So we finally finished a more polished version of the game, just in time for... the end of voting. But, no matter, the most important is that we've made a game we can show without feeling the need to apologize (I get a need to apologize pretty often, don't mind me).

New Version is awesome! We got lots of great feedback here and tried to use it to better the game. The main issue, balance, took way longer than I initially thought because it required re-working the code pretty deep, but it was worth it. Other things that at first seemed less important -like a tuto! who needs a tuto to understand a game? huh? ... well everybody apparently, and if you don't because you're the one who made it, that's cheating, apparently.

...Anyway: more minor issues that were brought to our attention were also solved: better navigation, some kind of tutorial, slightly better art, several endings, and better ease of use in general. Lots of small things that added up to a big jump in quality (translations didn't make the cut, sadly).

Play here!

Also have some tiles art because I personally find them very pretty.

I'm very sad that the previous blogpost doesn't seem to have been seen by anyone, so here's a new one at a hopefully better time:

So we finally finished a more polished version of the game, just in time for... the end of voting. But, no matter, the most important is that we've made a game we can show without feeling the need to apologize (I get a need to apologize pretty often, don't mind me).

New Version is awesome! We got lots of great feedback here and tried to use it to better the game. The main issue, balance, took way longer than I initially thought because it required re-working the code pretty deep, but it was worth it. Other things that at first seemed less important -like a tuto! who needs a tuto to understand a game? huh? ... well everybody apparently, and if you don't because you're the one who made it, that's cheating, apparently.

...Anyway: more minor issues that were brought to our attention were also solved: better navigation, some kind of tutorial, slightly better art, several endings, and better ease of use in general. Lots of small things that added up to a big jump in quality (translations didn't make the cut, sadly).

Play here!

Also have some tiles art because I personally find them very pretty.

Hi! Here's a PSA:

Guys. Please export your games for web.

If you used unity it's really easy (if sometimes a bit slow), just change the build settings to html5, and I saw one game that I know was made with Godot that had a web version so it should be doable (for gamemaker you need to buy the export plugin though, I'm sorry).

My reasoning: - I personnally will only download a game without web version if I really really really want to play it, while I totally will play a mediocre-looking game with a web version in hopes of being surprised. - Half the posts asking for games to review here ask for a web version specifically. - For my game, we had two downloads (both mac and windows builds were available), and now 47 ratings and 76 browser plays.

If you haven't exported for web and can, do it and I guarantee you will see the difference (if you either have a positive ratings balance score for people to play your game, or intend to post here to boost your game's views).

I know not bothering to download a build is laziness on my part, but if I'm gonna try fifty games, I damn well reserve the right to be lazy.

PS: I'd be interested in other people's download stats (available on itchio in Edit Games>Analytics) vs ratings (when they have both web and a downloadable build) to further (or contradict) what I say here (please tell for which platforms the downloadable builds are).

Everyone seems to be making post mortems, and one of them said "do it for future you", which convinced me. So. Post-mortem.

The idea for Finding Sam started out much more point-and-clicky, but we (@hangarter and I) spent a lot of time on the story (worth it), got in a fight and lost with Fungus (the Unity plugin that we chose to manage story interactions, because @hangarter had already used it, on smaller projects, and it had done the job well), and got both better and worse art than expected. So now it's very graphic novelly.

the Story

We talked a lot about the story, and once we had the outline and had asked "why?" (what lead to this thing happening?) enough times, we role-played it together, recording it, then reworked and rewrote it. It was fun, and helped get started. Overall, it was nice seeing something grow that none of us would have created on their own.
In the end it was 11 pages and 4500 words long (more like 4000 if you remove the speaker's name).

Fungus

Since our story is very non-linear, and it was important to be able to interrupt a dialog at any time, I lost probably half a day trying different ways to do that.
Also, Fungus saves all the story information in the scene itself, which makes me paranoid I'll lose it, so I decided to save every character dialog in a prefab. Bad Idea. The Worst Idea ever. Merge hell started then, and even when we broke the prefabs it kept going (to the point that at the end, we decided that only one person was to work on the scene/story at the same time; you know, the end, aka when you're struggling to integrate everything together, aka when you need all hands to work on the scene/story at the same time).
It's also lousy at adding dialog, it takes forever and way too many mouse clicks (you basically have to add it sentence per sentence, or the dialog won't interrupt like we needed).
I felt like it fought us at every step of the way and decided never to use it again (but @hangarter didn't seem to feel that way, and our needs were very specific).

the Art

I originally didn't want to make art, but programming instead for this jam (I ended up doing mostly story). Since I had failed to motivate any of my artist friends, I said I'd do the bare minimum for the art. Two hours on monday morning, I said when we did the planning, would be enough. I hadn't counted on needing to do the scene blockout in 3D (because who knows what a big living room where you could host a party looks like? Apparently not me), and a variation of the background for the flashbacks (which I'm very proud of), and character portraits. I ended up rushing a lot in the end, but once integrated into the game it looked surprisingly good.

Time management

The first evening, we made a planning: we had spent the day brainstorming, tracing the outline of the story and the choices that would make the game, and tested the basic functionalities we'd need with fungus. The evening would be for writing dialogs, until the end of sunday afternoon where we would stop and start coding (there was relatively little coding to be done). Art I could do in half a day, then putting everything together at the end of monday.
It was mostly followed, even if we spent the last night scrambling madly with exports and forgetting to set a game-breaking boolean.

Conclusion

I regret not allotting even a few hours to music and sound: I think it would have made the game much better for comparatively little effort.
And next time I'll try to form a team with more separate roles: not only do you lose a bit of time going from art to code to story back to code, and trying to understand what the other has done, but mostly I just missed the feeling I get when someone else does a part on their own and I look at what I've done and suddenly it's magically bigger thanks to their contribution (the art I did gets interactive or the programming I did gets pretty, seemingly on its own), which is a great feeling.
On the other hand, we did manage to finish the game, which is more than I got last ld (being in a team helps me organize and prioritize).

And we got great feedback very quickly which let us fix the (sometimes major) bugs that (since we hadn't actually tested it) had slipped into the game.

I kinda want to continue it (the story is about a quarter of what it should have been), but "I'll keep working on this jam game" is a well-known mirage. We'll see how it goes!