Minor Update + A look back at my first Game Jam game

MY FIRST GAME JAM - WHAT A FUN EXPERIENCE!

My first experience with a game jam, creating my second game, is now behind me. It was a great, fun, challenging and invigorating experience!  Coming into Zeno Jam 8, I only knew that Game Jams were "that thing where you develop a game with a time limit and certain restrictions/conditions met, right?" In the past week, I played and rated almost all the games of the jam, save for those I could not get to run properly.

Everyone provided such interesting, diverse and creative games - I really love looking at beginner's attempts at programming and games especially, there is always such a raw creativity that comes with learning something new and adjusting to new things! So to start this off: 

Thank you to everyone for participating, playing, rating - but most of all, creating games!

I had a blast playing your games, and I can only hope you enjoyed mine as much as I did, experiencing all of yours!

And thank you, everyone, for giving me 3rd place - I would have never imagined getting onto the podium for my first game jam, with my second game ever!

THE UPDATE

And this post doesn't only come with a celebration of my experience, it also comes with a small update for my entry. It isn't much, but here are the changes:

• Masochists rejoice! If you enjoy the endless mode unlocked after finishing the game - it now keeps track of the months you have played in it so far!
• For people wanting to challenge themselves, or wanting to experience the story but not having been able to finish the game, there is now an easy and hard difficulty, influencing how volatile your smile is, how fast your customers get annoyed, and the threshhold at which they will speak to your manager
• After finishing the game, there is an easter egg for you to find in the main menu

A LOOK BACK

Joining the jam had me irrationally nervous - I had finished my first game recently, building on a great tutorial for Godot 4 and extending that tutorial into a small game with a lot of issues - and a mess of a source code, patched together from code created during the tutorial and added experiments and functionality I read the docs and google to learn.

After watching the premiere of the theme reveal live (at 11:30 AM over here), I did what far too many nervous programmers do and had a smoke on my apartment balcony (PSA: Seriously, don't take up smoking, it's harder to kick than anything I have encountered in my life and has so little benefits). The very first idea that came to me during that break was an endless platformer, moving upwards, inspired by the old freeware game "Icy Tower" of my youth. I thought about maybe even making it an Undertale/Deltarune fan-game "Ice-E Tower", with extra slippery controls from playing an ice cube. Maybe I will one day get to making something like that as an exercise.

After the cigarette was finished, another thought crossed my mind: A parody of old flash games where you manage a restaurant - but instead of being a fun, happy "I have so much fun cooking for my customers and being successful"-experience, it should be a stressful experience of being employed as a server or cook. After a bit more thought, I realised a barista at a coffee shop might be an even better idea - simpler than having kitchen mechanics and seamlessly including preparing of the goods and interacting with the customers directly as an employee. Immediately, I wanted to include feigning happiness in spite of the stress as one of the main mechanics.

So, I sat down, fired up Pixelorama, spent some time creating a first draft of what the main interface would look like. A lot of time. Way too much time, for, well, a result that highlights that I come from an amateur programmer and not an amateur artist background:

This remained the interface for the first days of creating the basic structure of the game. Creating the spritesheet for the smiles was more succesful, and I was quite happy with how deranged the biggest, "overdoing it" smile looked - realising its striking appearance had to be front and center.

After I had the very basic mechanics done - at this point still doing my best to keep the source code somewhat orderly, I realised that, if I want to go for a sort of "1-bit" approach with colours highlighting only important things and it was a contemporary, somewhat realistic setting anyway - inspired by old flash games - why not use adjusted photography for the majority of the graphics? One advantage there being, that there are a lot of public domain photos out there, that can be used and edited freely.

Firing up GIMP, it was as easy as scaling the photos and using the colour indexing mechanics to apply a palette of just black and white. Completely overcomplicating things by creating that palette, while missing that GIMP actually has mono B&W as a standard setting, oops.

I always have the ambition to credit properly, so even though most assets ended up being proper public domain, I credited all of them in the description - even if the jam rules hadn't specified to do that anyway.

The next days, I was working on the game from morning to evening, getting into a flow quite quickly, not really looking at other submissions or discussions, sadly. The source code quickly had the main script file grow to gargantuan sizes, considering so much could have been compartmentalised into its own file. Especially when adjusting the different customer types, I ended up having a lot of redundant copy-pasted code - thankfully, everything was still simple enough to wrap my head around when I encountered bugs in playtesting - which were patched sometimes a bit clunkily - but hey, what works, works!

As the basic mechanics were relatively simple - I ended up having some time to focus on adding atmosphere. From the very beginning, I knew that the debt itself was supposed to seem insurmountable, and clearing it was supposed to be a red herring. So I went for the goal being just to keep surviving, as the theme of the jam went, "Never Give Up!" The ending was supposed to evoke an emotion of catharsis after the stressful game - which I aimed at to be tough, annoying, challenging, but actually hard to properly fail. There is a game-over state, which probably is the darkest the game gets, but it should be relatively uncommon to reach. Fun fact: Getting a game over on the last month has a slightly different cutscene playing out.

Using ChipTone, I managed to create fitting sound effects, myself. But for the music, I went to scouring OpenGameArt.org for assets, as I have neither the skills, experience nor tools - at least not at the moment. With an amazing amount of luck, searching for "happy" in the music category, I came upon what I can only describe as absolutely perfect for what I was aiming at: "Happy But Frozen In Time" by Alex McCulloch. I could not have commissioned a composer with money myself to get a better piece of music that carries that uncomfortable "happy but something is wrong"-vibe.

Then, on Friday evening, after some more testing, I finally decided "F it, I am just going to submit this as it is". At this point, I thought submitting would lock in your submission. I also did not know that game jams are rated by each other - I just assumed for some reason it would be a jury or the one that created the jam. After realising I could still edit something, I did not push an update as such - but I did decide that, this time, I would fully go GPLv3 on my code, and uploaded the source on Saturday.

In hindsight, there aren't a lot of things I would have done differently. Up until the end, I did wonder how I could get the player to continue playing to see the end, even though the game play is deliberately structured to be stressful and even somewhat annoying, trying to evoke adversity and a sense of helplessness. Maybe adding more story beats at the end of each month, making it clearer that this is not an endless game just repeating the gameplay loop, would have been a good idea.

If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading, I hope to see more games by all the people that participated in this jam, it was a blast! Congratulations to Plide, monninen and Tipu for their 1st and 2nd place! Your games were absolutely running away with it in my opinion, and definitely among my favourites of the jam.

Some of my other, personal favourites were, in no particular order, and chosen simply by a subjective criterium of "I liked something about it especially" (may have been charm, visible effort, pure fun, or just an irrational feeling somewhere in my unconscious mind):

• POWERLESS by cam_g
• The Fallen 2D by at.long.last.ace
• Journey through the Maze by 0424
• Chronically Amber by CodeWebWeaver, Victoria, Beer and Phoenix
• Sisyphus Idle by brotender
• Determination Dash by Lost Legacy Games
• The Unbeatable Game by Stellar Studio
• REBORN:ANEW by spookyrobloxman999

THANK YOU SO MUCH, EVERYONE, FOR MAKING MY FIRST JAM AN UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCE! <3