A tale of much ambition and little wisdom

It's 9am. Two hours before the Game Jam deadline. I haven't slept for... some time. The game is nowhere near the state I imagined it one week ago. What went wrong, you might ask? Let's start from the begining...

It all begun almost three years ago, when I first thought about trying myself at gamedev. I had an Idea of a game where you play as a wizard and casting spells is fun. I know, shocking! I thought than that spellcasting shouldn't just be "Press LMB to launch a fireball", I wanted to add some depth to it. So I designed a system where you have to draw spells in order to cast them. That's the game. I was really proud of it, my first game, it looks good (Thanks to NickΞnd, hope I'll have a chance to work with him as much as I did back then), the gameplay loop was fine, it felt dynamic and adrenalin inducing. Though the spellcasting system had one major problem - all the spells were hard coded. So basically you had to press RMB and a do a bunch more steps to launch a fireball. It was not what it must have been. I wanted a player to feel like a real wizard, to be able to come up with new spells on the fly, to feel the ignition of a light bulb above their head when they come up with a new magic trick. I dreamt about remaking this game for three years...

Fast forward to a week and a few days ago. I just finished another semester at university and wanted to do another Game Jam while on holidays. Lazily scrolling through itch's jams page I see one jam that looks interesting. "Improve My Game Jam" the title read. Only one thought was on my mind at the moment - "I have to remake my first game". No, not take the code I've built before and work on top of that (It was written three years ago when I was just starting out programming, the whole codebase is trash), but remake it from the ground up, with a new complicated spellcasting system. It was perfect, just what I was looking for! The jam is even one week long, if I made all of my other games in three days what could I do in a week! Oh, how naive I was.

Long story short: I started to build a team, my misician friend Sharperleer was going to be the, you guessed it, musician, NickΞnd was supposed to be the artist (YES! The gang's back in the game, baby!) and my other friend Daniel Lim would also help a little with things he could with his busy schedule. 

Two days into the jam - a disaster struck! NickΞnd has some problems with his pancreas! (He's doing ok now, though). We lost our primary artist. But that's alright, we'll probably manage ourselvs.

The spellcasting system was designed and programmed in the first half of the jam. Spell recognition was pretty alright, not incredibily hard, considering I still had some time behind my belt (the best code in the project (not like the bar is high)). The intricacies of drawing the spells though, ooohoho, that was a whole other problem (I trully hate arrays). But then came another chellange. I had to design a map. Who would have thought that it could be that hard! It's like, what, placing blocks and enemies around right? It's worth mentioning that I never did anithing like this before, all of my games were mostly just arcades. I new that it's not a complete piece of cake, but that it would take that much time! FOR SUCH A SMALL MAP!!! And at first I wanted the game to be a metroidvania. 

The decor of the rooms is yet another pinapple in my pizza. With no dedicated artist and no one who could UV unwrap a 3D model I also had to do this myself. Thanks to Daniel at least I didn't need to design charachters, it was always my kryptonite.

So 16 or so hours ago I really understood that we don't have much time left. I threw those little assets I was able to create at the few rooms I had time to make and it was time for the music...

When Sharperleer sent me what he had created it was time to figure out how we were going to put it into the game. For 4 hours we were trying to figure out the logic of Unreal Engine's Metasound and how do we change the music when a fight breaks out. Just for one track. For 4 hours we were sitting in a discord call, I was coding and Sharperleer was giving me directions on how should tracks change between eachother. Do you want to know the funny part? The trigger to change the music is only in one room of the game.

An hour ago I finished the build. I only had one texture I prepared some time during development to throw at walls and floors. I'm not going to lie, I think it looked better with default textures.

So what is this tale about? It is about how I spent the week in complete misery, trying to achieve in this timespan things I probably wouldn't be able to do in a month. I mean, I did all those games in just three days, they were all buggy and didn't look very good (except for the first one), but I feel like I had fine gameplay, why wouldn't I be able to do this little game with a scope of a Solar system in a week? And I had people who would help me. Right? 

All in all I think I did improve the game. The main mechanic feels more interesting and deeper. But the main thing is...

I've added the quit button!

So now when it's out of my hands it is for you to decide if the game is at least somewhat playable. I personally still think that it has great potential. Maybe some day I will finish it. Maybe another three years...