How we almost messed up GMTK2020

A breakdown of our game BIOGENETIC LAW for the GMTK 2020 game jam and how we almost ruined everything.

We had a blast participating in last years GMTK game jam, so we knew that we couldn’t miss it this year either. Sadly, our 3D artist couldn’t partake due to his personal life. So we knew we had to work twice as hard, and were also limited in the games we could create.

Day 0

We hop on discord at around 7.50 pm, make some bets on the theme and enjoy the people in the chat talking trash. At 8.05 mark hits us with a doozy. Again. The theme: out of control. I wanted to submit my life there, but I don’t think jokes would be appreciated. Just like last year it is a great theme which leaves a lot open to interpretation, while still giving a good direction to where you can take your game.

It is time to brainstorm. After completely missing the point for about 20 minutes and then actually getting some ideas onto paper for another 1 hour and 40 minutes, we end up with 4 ideas:

1. A card game where you can control only the order  in which the cards are played
2. A game where you can control the enemies and not the player characters
3. A text adventure where you can only control what your character did in the past and not what he will do
4. A base building game in which you can only control the environment and not the people itself

The first one does not seem too exciting and only stems from my deep rooted obsession with card games. I have a need to move every game in that direction. The second one seems fun and interesting. But in hindsight, I am glad that we did not choose it, since I have already played a game with the exact same idea. (And I a couple more - Ivan.) The fourth one is a great idea, but sadly it already exists. It is a game called Reus (check it out!). And the third one. Well, I, personally, got completely fixated on it and couldn’t think about anything else. It was really intriguing to me how you would build a character around it. So we committed on the idea and called it a day. Ready to start fresh and get to work the next day. I was amped up with excitement and couldn’t sleep at all, so I tried to come up with the basics of the story. 

It would be set in space and teleportation was allowed. Teleportation however took longer than normal space travel and was rather unpleasant. However, it was cheaper, so only the working class would use them while the rich could travel via spaceship.

Day 1

I presented the idea to Ivan in the morning, and he did his thing and spun an actual out of it. Here is the beginning sequence: 

“The company ship is very comfortable, and you are glad you don’t have to use the teleporter. Especially after what you have just learned. Teletronics, your employer, sent you to a routine inspection to a manufacturing plant, but you deviated from the path. You wanted to be sure they were doing their best. They were not. They are tampering with the machines and costing it efficiency and safety.”

Go ahead check it out now. It is 5 - 10 minutes long. From here on there will be mild spoilers on the story.

Since it was going to be a branching story we thought about using tools like twine.

But I said no. It is stupid to learn a new tool. BIG mistake! 

Back to the branching. We would flashback and let the player make choice the character did in the past. Then, when they were in the present again, we would let the character choose what they do automatically based on the choices in their past. 

We started hacking away. Ivan did the story, and I did the code, music and wrote some minor parts. Day one went great. The story was coming along nicely, the code was working and I had some time to write some music. So far so good. Tomorrow would be great. We would finish the story at around 14.00 pm, then work on visual presentation, make a bit more music and get a clean mixdown on it. With these dreams we went to bed...

Day 2

At around 14.00 pm, the best drug of them all--reality--started to kick in, and, oh boy, was it going to throw us on a trip near to the edge of insanity. We were nowhere near finished. The story had about 15 branching parts that needed to be tied up and so far 2% of it was in the game. I had--with my masterful coding skills--created a system, that, while working, took a painful amount of time to get the story into the game. Also it was branching a lot, then collapsing back into itself again. Then branching again. Which was not that easy to follow in the editor. To combat that I created a system to check for errors in the setup and then started to get the story in the editor. All while Ivan was frantically typing the story.

18.00 PM: I am wired out of my mind, trying to piece everything together in the horrible editor I created. Ivan just wrapped up the story. Should be smooth sailing right? 

Well, it took us about one and a half hours to finish everything. To seal of all the leaks and tie the story together. Ahhh, the feeling of success. All the stress melted off my shoulders, and I played it one more time before building it. Nice! I’ve never been to this part of the story before. Our branching is working! BOOM! IndexOutOfRangeException You idiot! At this point there are 20 minutes left, and, on certain options, you get stuck in the story. I am completely livid, I double and triple check everything, but there just is no time left. So we have to build. There are 10 minutes left. But I am on a new version so there are no build tools left. I quickly download them and get it up there. Ivan already made the page. It’s now 3 min past, and we finish perfectly on time. Nice. 

Finally, we can enjoy our game on the page. WAIT! Where is the game. Why is it not playing? Turns out some genius (me) uploaded a .7z and not .zip so itch.io can’t play the game. 

I want to sink into the floor, mold with it and never get up again. 

But, as you know, we got a happy ending. We wrote Mark, and he allowed us to upload the game. You can now play it and have a great time. It’s still bugged, but c’mon. Show me one that isn’t!

All in all GMTK’s game jam delivers again. Mark put something great out there for people to create, and we enjoyed the hell out of it. Keep em coming because we can’t wait for next year!

Simon
Bromberry Games