Sandsong - A Postmortem

I did another game jam! Did I have time to do another game jam? No :) alas here we are.

I joined this jam specifically because they incentivise writing a postmortem/devlog - I love both reading and writing postmortems, and I think more developers should write them. So here we go... Insert joker gif

Development

This... was not the game I wanted to make 😂 

I really wanted to make a little prototype of an action platforming boss rush game, because that's the game I've had in my head for a little while (okay, since I started playing hollow knight obsessively). I've had a ton of ideas for it, but none of them really fit the theme "isolation", and isolation doesn't really lend itself to balls to the wall action combat with massive bosses. Nor did I really have anyone on board for art, and I can't really do that myself!

Luckily my ability to come up with little games on the fly is almost unparalleled, and within four minutes of the theme reveal I had n idea that I thought would work well for the theme: A 2D platformer that's a bit like journey, with a focus on making the player feel isolated. Completely alone. Mechanically that should be pretty straightforward - I've got a 2D platformer controller that I've been tinkering with recently, it's always nice to have a base to start from. I could also reuse some player character sprites I had lying around from a previous project too, which sped things up even more. Great! I've got a character controller, a character sprite, and a simple idea that definitely seems doable.

I made my new project, copied over some stuff, and proceeded to spend eight hours tweaking the character controller. Two of which were spent trying to figure out why changing the jump height wasn't changing... the jump height. Turns out I'm a little bit thick (especially with how little sleep I have had recently), and there was a collider on the background - which was blocking the player's jump! Oops. 

Well, eight hours down and at least it feels fun to move around in. That's a good place to be. I figured I could have the player's character narrate their thoughts, having nothing else at all be interactable, nothing to give the player any hints - that would really tie in to the whole "isolation" theme. Ori and the Blind Forest had these really cool story text blocks that went up, so I copied that (why change something that works eh), and now you can see what the wanderer is thinking! Another hour lost to choosing a font, but hey, that's totally worth it for ✨ vibes ✨

The code for the text prompts is about 50 lines. It's stupidly simple, but it works well! I love this modular type of development, with really tiny little files that do one specific thing really well. This just uses DOTween to fade in/out the text based on whether you entered or exited a collider. I reused a bit of that to make a nice camera pan - using cinemachine and just enabling/disabling a higher priority virtual camera and tweaking the settings for how it switches between cameras. Again, really simple stuff, I love Unity for this sort of thing! 

The shades were also pretty straightforward. The player sprite actually looks like this:
I use a fancy shader to replace the red/green/blue channels separately, which means I can make it any colour I like. I just threw in some different colours from the palette I'm using (never underestimate a good palette), and boom - blue  glowy shades. They don't do anything, but that kinda fits the theme too! 

Okay, now I've got everything in place and I just need to make content! I figure some light platforming puzzles will work well, maybe one or two enemies to contrast the shades, and some musings from the wanderer that indicate a shift from "I'm bitter about the lonliness" to "isolation is kinda pretty". 

Great.

Now to... do absolutely nothing until the final day of the jam.

Yeah, oops! 

Time to rethink. Platforming is out, content like that takes so damn long to figure out. Enemies are out, I didn't even have attack animations so with the few hours I had available to me there was no way I could get that in. That just leaves ✨ vibes ✨ - I quickly threw together a particle effect that kinda looks like dust, and spent way too long tweaking it to look a bit better. Unfortunately, using Unity's spriteshape for the terrain meant I couldn't have it emit from the terrain itself, so it's just a big ol' box that follows the camera and rotates to match the terrain, which is why sometimes it looks a bit janky and spawns too high! 

Now for the music, which is probably the biggest win with this game. I love this track, I adore it. It fits the theme and the game perfectly, and it's just an old track I had lying around from a humble bundle! I quickly added it to the game (had to change a few settings to make it play properly on webgl), and I now had something that had the exact ✨ vibes ✨ I wanted :D now all that's missing is content.

Luckily sprite shape is really great, so I just kinda extended the little bit of dirt I already had there, using the spline tool to make it wobbly. I plopped down a few ghosts, and spent an hour trying to come up with some text bits that convey the lonliness -> acceptance pipeline. It... kinda works. It feels rushed at the end, but luckily I can pad that out by just moving the text further along 😂

Okay, I think I'm done? Lets build it and see. It seems to work fairly well. The ✨ vibes ✨ are certainly right!

The Good

So, I think the game completely embodies the theme. Theme usually takes a back seat for me, so it has been nice to fully embrace it - the art, the music, and the "story" all work together to paint a picture of... isolation. Pure isolation. You see "others", but can't interact with them. You're alone. But even those others disappear eventually, which rams another spike of "wow there really is nothing here, it's just me" straight through your heart. I never do this sort of thing well, I'm really happy with how it all turned out! Even the lack of any sort of gameplay kinda ties into this theme too. There's nothing else there, running and jumping are themselves isolated.

The Bad

Uh, how did I lost eight full days? I'll tell you how:

Hollow Knight

I played twenty five hours of hollow knight during the jam, and I could've spent that whole time on this game. The problem was... I didn't really want to work on this game. It's not my sort of game, I like action arcade stuff. I know this sort of thing requires a lot of Content™️, and I don't like doing content. It is pretty light on tools, and I love doing tools. There's no action, it's all just story and theme! I'm not good at writing 😂 it's not a skill I have particularly worked on, it's not something I really see myself needing, so it was very difficult to motivate myself to do anything for the project. 

Because of this massive gap, there is basically no game at all. Sorry! Hopefully the vibes make it worth it, the music certainly does I think. There are no quality of life features, there's nothing there that I would really call "fun". It's not my sort of game, basically. I think what's there works well enough, there's a bit of jank with the particles but not enough to ruin the experience I don't think.

Conclusion

I joined another jam 😂 I wanted to really get stuck in with it, and completely failed there. At least it didn't take time away from family life or prep for bullet hell jam, and I got some downtime while playing games. I didn't get a prototype of the game I wanted to make. I didn't really even make a game, and it certainly is not something I expect to win any prizes (though that's not really the point now is it).

However... what's there is different. It's not the sort of thing I would usually choose to make, I've stepped out of my comfort zone and actually succeeded in making something feel a certain way. I didn't rely on game feel, massive lasers, reaction-based gameplay, or anything like that. I made a cozy little game that really does embody "isolation", and I think that's neat.

End.