“I just want to”: Lessons from a Burp to Remember

In early August, I published my 5th game here on itch.  It remains my most successful.

Welcome to the 5th post in my gamejam retrospective series, where I overthink the lessons I’ve learned from each game I’ve made.

I Just Want To

Before I started this game, I was starting to wonder if I were becoming a game jam addict.

I had already submitted to my 3rd jam in less than a month, I was working on a 4th, I was signed up for a 5th one starting in just a few days, and then I tried and failed to convince myself not to start a 6th.

I wrote about Take The Stairs in the previous post. After my first few hours of working on it, I was settled into bed thinking I was done with game dev for the day, and would finish Take The Stairs the next day because I knew I still had at least a couple hours to go. I told myself my game jam addiction wasn’t a problem if it didn’t get in the way of sleep, work, or social activities. 

So I was going to relax for an hour before going to sleep, and I was browsing around itch being reminded of the Wanna Jam with the theme Inside Out.

I had already decided not to join it. 6 game jams in a month is too many, 7 would be literally ludicrous.

But before I decided not to join it, I had this idea. A little burp going from the inside out. Just a simple game where you’re in the body, collecting bubbles and growing until it’s burpin’ time.

And when the power was out and I didn’t have much to do, I spent a little time searching on my phone to learn about burps. I learned of multiple ways gasses could enter the stomach. I got ideas for different gas compositions depending on what burp gasses were collected from where.

The previous week’s Trijam, the one I made Depths of Jupiter for, had a submission called Deep Dive Dining that includes nomming bubbles to get bigger, which may just possibly have influenced my idea of nomming bubbles to get bigger.

Nomming bubbles is fun.

But did my burp idea need to be made?

I’d made a list of considerations after my 2nd jam, which I’ll repeat here:

• What game development things on my to-learn list will I learn making this?
• How vibe are the vibes? Is it an atmosphere I’m uniquely capable of making?
• What would I be learning about myself and my artistic voice by making this?
• What’s actually unique or interesting about it?
• Does this game really need to be made, and made now? Can I leave the idea for later and see if I'm still interested?
• If I don't have time to complete it to my satisfaction before the jam deadline, will I still care about it in a month, enough to come back and fix things that are broken or add things that are missing? 

The answer to every single question on this list made it clear I shouldn’t make this burp game.

The gameplay was cliche. The vibes might be cute and fun, but there’s plenty of cute fun games out there if I want to play a cute fun game. It would use my existing skills. If I didn’t make it for this jam, I didn’t think I’d bother with the idea in the future. It just wasn’t that interesting an idea.

I decided not to join the jam, and to prioritize the game ideas I was already working on.

But then there I was that night, after the Wanna Jam was already halfway over, wondering what to do with myself for an hour that would be fun and relaxing. I didn’t want to play games or read or watch videos. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do more than make this game. I wanted to open up Krita and draw some cute li’l burp faces. I didn’t even care if I ended up not finishing it.

I had every reason not to work on this game, and yet I thought to myself:

I just want to.

Cutting To The Essence

Wanting things is nice. 

Whenever I notice myself wanting a thing I can actually have, I try to give it to myself. Because a lot of the time, I don’t want things. Or I want only things that I cannot have. And other times I have trouble telling whether I actually want something, or just think I should want it, or am only telling myself I want the thing because it’s a thing I can have and so therefore it would be nice if I wanted it.

On this evening, I felt clear in my feeling that I simply wanted to work on making this game, right at that moment.

So why not just work on a silly game for an hour before bed? Not everything I make has to be a deep learning experience, high concept, artistic masterpiece.

And in an hour, thanks to the practice I’ve gotten making games quickly, I had a game with a burp that could move around in a stomach, collecting bubbles and growing bigger. There wasn’t any end, and there was only one type of bubble, and they didn’t move or respawn. But you could nom bubbles, and nomming bubbles is fun.

The next day, I did some thinking. Could I really find time to finish this game? What’s really the essence of the idea I like so much, and the shortest, fastest, easiest version of the game that captures that thing I like?

I decided the idea I had for multiple levels with different parts of the digestive system was not something I wanted to spend time on. The game didn’t need to be longer, it just needed to let my burp be a burp. All it needed was an ending and some sound effects and it would be perfectly submittable. It wouldn’t be a great game, but I wanted to participate in the jam and play other people’s games and maybe have some nice interactions.

I could just set a timer, I thought. Something like 5 minutes, and then have the game end, and have a couple different endings texts depending on how much you collected because I like multiple endings, and it’d be good enough.

I thought of the lessons I’d learned from my 2nd game. Cutting to the essence.

It doesn’t need to be five minutes, I thought to myself. Two minutes is plenty for a game jam setting, for a game with this little depth.

Maybe even one minute.

Why a minute? Why not half a minute?

The game finally became interesting to me when I asked myself the question: what is the version of this game that lasts only 20 seconds?

Endings and Secrets

I wanted multiple endings. And I wanted to do it in a better way than what i’d done for Even Shadows Into Gold, where I had all these variables for what you’d unlocked as you progressed in the game. The logic grew so complicated I started making mistakes, and ending logic mistakes are hard to catch when it requires playing through 15 minutes of game and doing all the right things to trigger the logic fail state.

Playtesting takes valuable gamejam time. I knew I would want to do multiple endings in future games, and that I’d better try some other techniques that don’t so easily lead to game breaking bugs in hard-to-find edge cases.

But I realized that the decision to make the core gameplay loop be 20 seconds would make playtesting easy!

And with multiple gasses to work with, I decided to try storing the percentages as attributes of the character, kind of like an RPG stats system. No hard-coded logic for whether you’ve unlocked one ending or another as the game progresses, just stats with numbers that update, and then only at the end of the game will it look at the numbers and choose an ending.

(At least, that’s how almost all the endings work.)

Let me tell you, this was so much easier than the mess I made of my ending logic last time. 

Working Backward Backward

My instinct is usually to work backwards from endings. Have the desired possible endings, then design the levels of a game to give you what you need to get there. Tweak the items and balance in the level until the ending is achievable.

Because the game is so short, I realized that rather than trying to design the area to have the right amount of bubbles to reach my endings, I could just put whatever feels good in there, and then just play it through a bunch of times. For each ending I wanted, I’d play the way that should lead to each ending, and write down the gas percentages I’d collected.

Then I could just set the thresholds for the different endings based on the playthroughs I’d done.

I felt really smart about this, even though it seems obvious in retrospect. Usually I work backward, and here I cleverly decided to work backward backward. 

…Which, I now realize, is just normal working forward.

And it’s truly amazing how much time you save during game development just for sheer playtesting, when your game is 20 seconds long.

Things went quickly enough that I had time to add in one of the secrets I really wanted to add, and endings were so easy to make that I could add a nice variety.

the end

Today I did a small update on this game to fix controller support, and make some other tweaks.

It’s been satisfying to hear how many people played through multiple times, so I rearranged some dialogue options to make it easier to play through multiple times, and fixed a couple minor bugs that happened in the dialogue under certain replay conditions. I also added an additional way to [redacted] since zero people apparently managed to [redacted].

I think I found the right balance of time and effort spent to make this little game happen. It’s still probably the most fun of my 13 games to actually play. It did well in the jam, placing 8th out of 152 entries, and had 42 ratings, which is just SO many ratings.

Fun is not what I look for in general from my creations, but I’m glad to know I can do it when I want to.

I am tired now. The end.

Blog series index:

1. Vibes-first game development
2. Cutting to the Essence
3. Let Secrets Connect
4. Accessible vibes
5. I just want to