The making of Blue Insides

Preparations:

I played this game called Black Bird from the Blacthornprod GameJam and was blown away from the quality. It changed the way I think of GameJams and even affected me in the way I think of making games in general. It was a polished experience with an amazing atmosphere. I wanted to create something similar, something that makes you feel like a part of a world. Fortunately, I had already signed up to the Wowie Jam 3.0, so it wouldn't be long before I got to make this game I dreamed up. I didn't have much concepts,  I only knew that I want to make a similar atmosphere to Black Bird's and that I needed to make it fit the theme of the Jam. I thought the theme will be something that I can easily implement, and would make my game more distinct from other games with good atmosphere. Knowing that I would have to invest a lot of time into polishing the game, I prepared a basic platformer controller (with a bit of help from Whiteshampoo)  ahead of time, so that I had a starter base.

Friday 15:00  - Saturday 3:00:

I watched the theme announcement video from Jonas Tyroller and It was "Failure is progress". I did not expect a theme that was so fundamentally different from my goals. I mean, if you think about it, it's pretty hard to make an atmospheric game, where every failure helps you progress. The typical games I could think of were not the ones with atmosphere/story. "But what if I approached the theme from a story perspective?!" I thought to myself.  Yes, that could work! And I jumped into the project with this. I imported the character controller and went on to draw the player. I was going to use an easy vector graphics maker program called Vectr, but I couldn't make the player how I wanted to. I wanted to use strong gridsnapping for the whole process, but that program's solution for snapping was more of a gentle push than a hard set, which made the process hard. So I decided to hop back into Godot and decided that I'll make the entire game's graphics with the Polygon2D node. I ended up staying up real late making the player and animating it. I didn't really do the animations the proper way, but they worked and looked fine, so I called the day after that.

Saturday ? - Sunday 3:00:

At this point I was a bit stressed, because I knew I didn't get much done yesterday,  so I tried to do things a lot more efficiently. This was the day when I scrapped original music for the game, since I wasn't able to make a final version fast enough. (This is mostly what I wasted most of my time on at Friday.) For the main idea, I thought that I could make a level where you have to pick a route trough the level to escape a Blue cave. If you didn't pick the correct path, you still made progress, because now you know which way is the correct one. This sounded good on paper, but it would need a level with many exits to be truly good. But probably because the time limit, I ended up making a really linear level, where the player chooses from either the left or right. This is definitely not the strongest part of the game looking back, but I did what I could and what I felt would be necessary at the time. Also, I messaged Whiteshampoo once again, who made an awesome outline effect for the player and spikes..

Sunday ? - Monday 3:00:

When I woke up, I had 1 level and a character who had to avoid spikes in that level. That probably wouldn't be enough, so hurrying even more, I made a menu, a tutorial level, and added sounds. And I also made sure to add a pause menu. Once again, whiteshampoo helped with scripting and added a Dash ability. It made the game more fun to traverse trough, easier and a bit more unique. By the end, I had a mostly ready game. I had most mechanics working. now all I had to do was polishing! Lots and lots of polishing! Here is how the game looked before the polishing process started:

And this is how it looked after the GRAPHICS UPDATE: (Thanks for the help at making choices LTGD discord channel!)

Monday ? - Monday 15:00:

I playtested the game along with some other nice people (,  gave it a name,) and published it to itch with 2 hours and 24 minutes before the deadline.

Post mortem:

Ultimately, what I learned from this project, is that 1) if you enter a gamejam, make sure you don't go in with a preset idea, or at least be willing to throw it away. It'll help you make a better game that gets higher ratings, because it fits the theme better. 2) Yes, you can achieve creating an atmosphere in a few days. It takes a lot of polish and graphics design, but the end result will speak for itself. And I learned some more specific things too, like that you should learn to use a normal graphics software instead of doing everything in the editor. It might end up saving you time and hassle.

Overall, I'm happy with the game. It doesn't fit the theme perfectly, and in some areas it lacks a bit, but it can be expanded if I want to. At the very least it taught me a lot and I am kinda proud of it. It is my best game yet. Next time, I’ll try to exceed this quality even higher! :)