Brain and Gut: Our Game Jam Journey

First things first, after making a couple of platformers, we wanted to try a different game genre. Platformers have been our comfort zone, and while we enjoyed making them, we felt it was time to challenge ourselves. After brainstorming, we decided on a point-and-click adventure. The genre’s storytelling and puzzles intrigued us, and we believed it would let us be creative in new ways.

However, we didn’t realize that point-and-click games need a lot of content, which put us under pressure. Unlike platformers, which focus more on mechanics, these games require detailed art, intricate puzzles, and engaging narratives. We needed to create a lot of content quickly, which was overwhelming.

We made a few bad decisions to save time and meet the deadline, but these mistakes ended up costing us more time. Here’s a breakdown of the challenges we faced:

• Master Level Design: We created one big master level and duplicated systems and characters for every room. This caused bugs, like controlling players through all rooms at once, even with our smart flags for activating and deactivating rooms.

• Interaction System: I wanted a simple system, but it turned out to be too simple or maybe not a good fit for our game. Next time, I’ll use a composition and component approach instead of inheritance.

• Dialogues and Storytelling: We got lost in creating dialogues and storytelling. It was crucial but we underestimated the effort required.

• Buggy Puzzles: Our flawed interaction system broke puzzles with every “interaction system fix,” resulting in a lot of rework and frustration.

Despite these challenges, we learned valuable lessons that we will use to improve future projects.

The game was made for the GoedWare Game Jam, and with only 8 days to work on it, we couldn’t finish everything. The technical state of the game is not good right now, and we didn’t make it in time. But despite these challenges, we are proud of what we have achieved.

Stay tuned for updates as we work on improving the game and adding more content. Thank you for your support and understanding!