Lessons from my Second Game Jam

Last time, I articulated my game development guiding star: “vibes-first”. 

Today’s post is about a supporting principle: “cutting to the essence.” 

Plus, introspecting about my relationship to my work and its relationship to its environment.

Introduction: Motivation for “Even Shadows Into Gold”

It’s been just over a month since I published “Even Shadows Into Gold.”

I was hopeful that my first game, “I Will Set,” taught me enough about the Godot engine and about my own capabilities that I was ready to try scoping out a week-long project and execute on a design.

I wanted to find a jam for which I could design a game using mostly what I already knew, while learning at least one new thing from my “To Learn In Godot” list, which at the time looked like this: 

• object physics
• dialogue system
• switching scenes
• splash and end screens
• spawning objects 
• parallax
• global variables
• controller support
• timers
• tweens

For this game, with a week rather than a day, I managed to learn half of those things! And it feels good to realize that I’ve since learned the rest. It's hard to tell without looking back, since the list keeps growing.

I ended up going with a jam that was already halfway over but still had a week left, because the theme “Shadows and Alchemy” was so evocative. I also liked that they required a game development document. I later withdrew, because it turns out I did not understand how that jam worked, but I still achieved my goal of making a game while learning things from my list and about myself.

I’d already committed to vibes-first game development, and “Shadows and Alchemy” is a vibe. 

I went through a few different game ideas, going so far as to start writing out GDDs for them. But the “vibes first” principle led me to reject the obvious stuff and come to something slower and more contemplative. 

When I think “Alchemy,” I think intellectual history, the evolution of scientific thinking, the Italian Rennaisance. When I think “shadows” in this context, I think of shadows as the allegorical opposite of knowledge and truth. I think of Plato’s cave, and the ancient greek philosophy that was beloved by 15th century alchemists. Put it all together and I think of being so sure of your current knowledge that no shadow can survive you. 

Immortality is just around the corner. The inevitability of progress is coming for those with minds great enough to understand it.

I wasn’t sure I was going to do the jam until I came up with the tagline “A true alchemist can turn even shadows into gold.”

There was a game that wanted to be made, and that no one else could make.

Part 1: Vibes By Addition

"Vibes first" was the goal. But how does one first their vibes?

The first most obvious thing to do is more vibes.

Add Art

My day 1 work was to run a vibes-test on art. I needed to see how hard it would be to make parallax layers with a limited palette and get things looking like I wanted. I wanted it to feel simple and easy. I envisioned these murky shadowy scenes that are reliant on motion/parallax to parse, but that’s really hard to judge without a lot of testing and experience.

I’m not naturally a very visual person, and I went through a lot of rejected art that day before I got to something good enough to pass the vibe check. I would’ve liked another day, but I still like what I ended up with. 

When it comes to not letting perfection be the enemy of good, I like to remind myself that for game jams, “if only I had another day” is a day that will come soon enough in another game jam. And I got my opportunity not long after, when the Godot Wild Jam had the theme “Dark and Light”. My game “tell it to the stars” more confidently captures a shadowy parallax feel at night, and I was really delighted to follow through on riding the line of unparsable shadows. I think there’s still more vibe to vibe, in that direction, for next time.

For Even Shadows Into Gold, all I really needed from the art was for the climax of the game to work.

I wasn’t confident in my art vibes until I had the art done and implemented. I needed to see it. And that first moment I had the late-game backgrounds in and saw them in game for the first time was a special moment for me. I looked at my game and I loved it.

Add Music

For music, I can be confident in exactly how something will sound and vibe before I’ve written or recorded it. I also know what I can achieve in what amount of time. So I left the music for later in development.

Most of the music in this game, and all of the music in every other of my games thus far, is recorded live without having written anything down. I've developed the skill to improvise or think it up and hold it all in my head, whether it’s solo keyboard or multitracked harmonies. 

But when I got to the audio day I had scheduled, I was taken over by the need to write a proper 15th century style madrigal. Something complex enough that it would be faster to write it down and then record than it would be to go straight to recording, and not because it would be super fast to write and notate.

Madrigals. A single form of music that contains both the kind of intellectual vibe this game needed to follow through on in order to take itself seriously as a historically-inspired alchemy game, while also containing the artful beauty and mystery required to be a proper shadow.

So I spent a full half of my audio day just to write and record one song, and it was so worth it.

Add Dialogue

Last in the vibes addition category is the writing. 

I wasn’t able to add as much as I’d have liked, with how careful I was about trying to get the voice of the character right. I also wanted some historical accuracy, and references to real alchemists. Cleopatra the Alchemist, Maria the Jewess, and Fang are all referenced, along with their discoveries and inventions. I looked up what 15th century apiaries looked like. I looked up when different pigments were discovered and used.

The challenge was to make the character’s thoughts sound legitimately intellectual, with the vibe of “this is the height of modern thinking”, while also being true enough to history that we understand this is historical thinking, “incorrect” thinking, and that we have to suspend our disbelief if we want to go along with the character’s narrative. They are very smart, and their thinking is sympathetic and understandable, but they don’t actually have the world figured out.

The amount of writing in this game is at about bare minimum of what it needs to get through the story. At least a couple of my playtesters did seem to really get the character and what the game was really about, so I guess the bare minimum is enough to survive. But adding more writing is near the top of my list for an update. 

It just takes time and good writing is hard.

Part 2: Vibes By Subtraction

Adding vibes is a great way to get vibes into a game, but vibes-first game development requires also removing everything that is not the vibe.

One of my strengths is that I’m capable of being a ruthless editor. This was the game where I learned the extent to which that skill transfers to game development.

And so, if my first game taught me my first principle—Vibes First—this game taught me a supporting principle: Cutting to the Essence.

Subtract Inventory

I wrote an inventory system, and started implementing the normal sorts of adventure game things you might expect. You could find a rock on your desk, and later throw it into the sea. 

Such fun.

And why? 

My game was looking a lot like an adventure game as far as mechanics were concerned, so inventory was an obvious thing to think of. It encourages interacting with things around the world. It makes it feel more gamey, gives it more “gameplay”. I'm pretty sure it's so obvious that any adventure game that doesn't actively resist having items and inventory will inevitably grow items and inventory.

But did it contribute to the vibe I was actually going for?

I realized that, in fact, it did not. 

So I took it out.

The fact that I’d spent time and effort on it, figuring out how to make a dictionary in gdscript and make everything talk nicely between different scenes as well as in the dialogue system was not a consideration in this decision. 

The fact that finding and using items would give players an immediate sense of familiar gameplay, goals, and something to do? That was a consideration, and for this game’s vibe those things are all negatives.

Subtract Jump

The player character was originally a traditional sidescrolling sprite that could jump and move in the familiar way players are used to. The kind of thing that immediately makes a game look like a game, that lets a player touch the keys/controller and feel like they’re playing a game. 

Bored or unsure of yourself? Hit the jump button to get instant feedback that you exist and affect the world!

Then I realized the alchemist is not someone who jumps. This person is not young. They are neither silly nor joyful nor fond of any exercise beyond contemplative walks through the woods. This is someone who gets out of breath if they must climb a hill to get to a castle. 

Staying true to character was a goal of mine, and I’d already been conscious of avoiding any “clever” dialogue lines that didn’t fit the alchemist’s personality. Having them jump around like a child was not the vibe.

So jumping was cut from the game. 

I thought back to this when trying to decide how/whether to have jump in my most recent game, “Mr. Philips Videopac, Age 43”. 

I wanted to limit certain movements for reasons, and a regular sidescrolling videogame jump is definitely not something Mr. Philips Videopac can do. He’s recovering from a knee injury, and he’s not happy that he recovers so much more slowly from injury than he did in his 20s. But he’s a very physical man. He would like to jump, to do more with his body. He wouldn’t ignore the urge to jump altogether. 

So I made the jump button give a small lift, like he’s rising up on his toes for a moment, perhaps perking up to look at something over the horizon, perhaps giving a shrug. A more natural, human movement than a Super Mario leap of a cartoonish height.

I've been thinking about jumping a lot. I still have more thinking to do about jumping.

Subtract Player Character

A day or two before the deadline, just hours before I sent it out to my first playtesters, I realized I could take the player character sprite out altogether.

The player character still exists invisibly on screen to control camera movement, collide with objects, and trigger interaction, but the navigation is simple enough that you don’t need to see an avatar running into things. 

That simple change made it feel closer to a visual novel than a sidescrolling platformer, despite the mechanics having not changed at all. One sprite goes invisible and the game changes genre.

It makes the game feel so much simpler when you aren’t constantly visually reminded that the game’s programming includes coordinates and collisions and frames updating in response to your input. 

It makes it a bit more first person, a bit more introspective. Like less of the game is on the screen, and more of it is within yourself.

Subtract Music

I recorded a lot more music, and started putting in different background music for different areas. But I decided it was distracting from the game’s overal vibe to add too much differentiated area vibe.

It was not important to have the forest feel like its own separate vibe, but it was important to have the clearing feel extra special, so cutting the special forest music helped the vibes. 

It was less important to have the different areas feel different from each other in space, and much more important to have them feel different in time as the story progresses. So the echoey background vocals meant for the castle got cut and replaced with a slowed version of the normal background music, saving vocal harmonies for later.

I was really fortunate that for this game cutting music became the vibe, because my first export was too big to put on itch, and music was a large chunk of the file size. I had to cut down the length of some tracks and lower the quality.

Subtract Dialogue

I removed the ability to do default actions and dialogue at the end of the game, so that the world feels emptier and quiet and only your own thoughts remain. By then the player will have navigated around enough that hopefully they know how areas connect, so some of the places I had dialogue to gate movement between areas was no longer necessary. 

It’s a small detail, but just another example of where it took extra work to make there be less “game” in the game.

Subtract Game Jam

This is almost something I wasn’t going to include, because I don’t want to sound critical of the game jam or its hosts. This isn’t about them, it’s about what I learned about myself. They obviously put in a ton of work to serve their community. I just accidentally showed up to the wrong jam.

I liked that writing a Game Development Document was mandatory, and I had fun articulating a lot of my process and thinking into my GDD. I had hopes that part of the jam interaction would include people reading each other’s GDDs and thinking a bit more deeply about game development than usual.

I realized I really miss that kind of discussion, and I’ve since been finding more effective ways to scratch that itch (this blog series being but one example).

I also learned to check for the community tab and not join jams that have it disabled and instead require joining external sites. I trust that the jam's community would be very friendly if I wanted to join their sites, I'm just not looking to add more accounts and subscriptions and websites to my life right now, I'm only just learning how to itch. I’d taken itch's community features for granted before and have been using them more since. 

Actually, I do have one criticism of this jam, and it’s that the hosts are absolute madlads. 

The jam was labeled as ranked, and I was really confused when the deadline came and there was no ability to rank. I kept googling how to vote in the jam. I couldn’t figure out whether the actual jam activity was happening on discord, itch, reddit, or somewhere else, and I couldn't ask in the community tab that didn't exist.

In all my confusion over how rating works, never once did I consider that the hosts were going to do it all themselves. 15 THOUSAND people signed up. What are you doing! How! There is no way you are playing and rating thousands of games, is there? That has got to take an unreasonable amount of time and effort, why would you commit to that, why would you do that to yourselves?

I imagine that for many folks in that community it’s pretty awesome to have someone from a team they admire play and give feedback on their game, even if there isn’t time to engage with it very deeply. It’s kind of a beautiful thing that the hosts are doing. That kind of commitment is legendary.

Personally I’m not looking for that kind of feedback, I don’t know those guys, and I don't want people I don't know aiming their sense of commitment in my direction. My game is not for that. These shadows are not for you to turn into gold.

It might not be logical, or reasonable, but it gave me an unpleasant feeling, so I solved it by withdrawing.

Just one more thing cut from the game for the sake of the vibes. Let my shadows remain shadows.

Final Thoughts: On Art and Environment

I have the luxury of having time to explore my voice in game development. I currently have no career goals here, and I might never sell a game. I protect this work by doing other work, and somehow this past month I've had the time and energy for both.

I’ve been enjoying the community aspect here on itch more than I thought I would, and I like having a small self-curated audience. A thoughtful interaction with someone whose name I recognize is worth infinitely more to me than a million shallow words from a thousand faceless strangers.

When I was writing the description of this game, I knew it wasn’t good marketing. I knew exactly how I could change it to draw in more eyeballs and get more clicks. And it made me happy to be able to represent it as it is, hoping it would find only the right match. The kind of people who see the word “madrigal” and get excited. 

It’s like joining a dating site. Sure you can get more first dates by saying things you think people want to hear, but if you want a meaningful relationship you’re better off being real.

I want a meaningful relationship between myself and my work.

Maybe it would be nice if others had meaningful relationships with things I make, but I’m honestly not sure whether I care about that these days. I think I’ve been fortunate to get a lot of that in my life, and I've become more... something.

With this game I learned that the relationship I have with a game includes the relationship it has with its environment. I was surprised how much I didn’t like having it stay in the wrong jam, even if it's not the jam's fault and it's kind of too late, but it’s not where that game wanted to be, and who am I to argue?

It seems obvious now that I’ve identified it, because with art in general I’m aware that environment is part of the art. The contextual dependence of art even includes the cultural context that sometimes people enjoy viewing art through an artificial lens where we pretend art exists independent of context.

We know how to pretend that an object is the same platonic thing whether it’s in a famous gallery with a pricetag of millions or in the corner of a random person’s messy home studio. We’ve learned methods for discussing a book as if the words stay the same regardless of the author and what choices they’ve made recently. Game mechanics feel closer to being platonic objects than most things, and it’s certainly easy to spend life only seeing games as self-contained products to be distributed.

But the reality is that—and I don’t pretend to know how—things have meaning. Things exist with purpose. Relationships matter.

“Even Shadows Into Gold” was my 2nd game, in a game engine I’d started learning less than a week earlier, made in a week, with so much time spent learning how to do things and making mistakes and cutting out things I spent time to add. 

It is, in many ways, not very impressive. And there’s things I’d like to improve. 

But it is itself, even moreso itself now that all the extra marble that wasn’t itself has been cut away. 

After a month apart, I’m pleased to find that itself and myself still get along fabulously.