Clone Biographer - How it came to be

Clone Biographer:

How it came to be

Fresh off the Pirate 16 Game Jam I heard about the Solodev Marathon Jam #4. I joined the group's Discord, great community, and saw that it was okay to remake a previous game under this Game Jam's rules. After having some issues  evolving a project into a game (kind way of saying it was more of a "learn Tilemaps"  project than a game) from the first Game Jam, I wanted to remake Hot Vengeance and thought this would be a great opportunity to achieve it. I signed up and started to hunt for the "one" thing I thought was critically lacking from the original version of Hot Vengeance, music. I had received some great feedback on the material that was there and some requests / ideas on what needed to be in the next "updated version" of the game. Music was key to setting the mood and reinforcing the idea that this was not going to be standard happy discover this world RPG. I spent a few days reviewing hundreds of tracks and talking to the bulk of my musical contacts, however while I had determined a chiptune sound track would pair best with the very retro 8-bit graphics I couldn't find a loop that wasn't too happy. I can expand on that more, but it will most-likely be in a devlog for Hot Vengeance vs. being here. Therefore, I posted an updated version to itch and set off to find a different project for the Solodev Marathon Jam #4.

Deep into the jam I had made a few Game Design Docs (GDD) for possible projects to do for the jam, but nothing had lite a fire. Sci-fi themed games are my passion, and when a longtime coder hit me up on an old game idea, including an offer to help with the character creator, I quickly agreed. This was on the Feb 22nd, and the Game Jam ended on Mar 7th, giving us less that 2 weeks to take an idea we had kicked around nearly a year before into high gear. It was totally over scoped from the moment we started.

By the first of March, my coding friend had gotten a star system generator remade to work in a newer version of Godot and created the character creator. Now for most games the character creator is about placing a name and picking some graphics, this was not the case with this one. Players where to build out their backstory and some in-game starting materials, like debt, a spaceship, extra skills, etc. I was crafting the UI to take their systems and display it in a more user friendly way. On the 2nd of March, I had the realization that even with the map systems starting to come together we were too far from something complete to submit as a game.

We shifted the idea and the development focus on utilizing the bulk of what was made, the character creator. We kicked around a few ideas, that would be the reasoning behind the character creation being the bulk of the game. We decided that the a story would be the best anchor, after some brain storming and refining, landed on the player would be creating the backstories for the groups going out into the world. However, I had the scope increasing idea that we would add Early Life Section to the character creator, which if the UI had covered the current game loop wouldn't have been a bad idea, but that was not the case.

With the idea of a story anchor decided we refined the focus, the player would be a newly hired  Clone Biographer. We that core idea, we laid out some basic elements we would need to help the story,  and commissioned some art from Fiverr. After the first couple pieces came in we wrote some tutorial text that doubles as presenting some story narrative. As the Indie Game Clinic has said, adding story adds scope, and with 4-5 days left in the Game Jam, this was probably a poor use of time. I do think we needed to add the tutorial components and are still working on this as it helped us focus some UI design choices.

We continued to push all the way to the deadline to get the game loop complete, still we missed the mark. You can do everything in the game, but it is missing the results to the player's actions. This is a bit sad, however we have gotten a lot of feedback on the game and think it is a Steam grade game idea. Therefore we are investing into the game. We have commissioned art and  music from very talented people to refine and get the game into a state that is more emergent. Some of these things are elements was had discussed and had in prototype states during the jam, but was not able to get into the product that shipped. 

Result

The game didn't make it into the submission list. I did make a post on reasoning. TLDR; over confident on having setup the web export on a previous project and failed to realize that a new version of the game engine would require the massive download with 5 minutes before the deadline. This didn't hurt our resolve for the game. Still I did post the game (6 minutes after the deadline).