Mark West

(Advance/Advance2112) Aspiring game developer and a man of too many interests.

4 minute read

Revisiting my first three jam games and making them less awful.

Moon Viewing, The Tower of Babel, and SUFFER.er were the first three games I made for game jams. All three were made in Godot in anywhere from 2 weeks to about 7 days. I recently revisited these games and made some small changes to them.

The Goal

Working on these games, as well as Lapis and Rhubarb: The Orb of Doom, has taught me so much about not only Godot, but also about game design and UI/UX. I had a desire to make my games a bit more presentable, so I figured now is a good time to revisit these projects and fix them up a bit. The idea was to keep the intention, ideas, and (most importantly) failures of the jam versions intact, while also making them at least a little bit more playable.

Moon Viewing

Moon Viewing has many, many problems. But many of those problems are outside the scope of this update. If I had all the time in the world (and was actually interested in this game enough) I would love to find the time to make the game shorter, make the story more engaging, introduce the mechanics in a better way, and just generally make it more of a “puzzle” game, rather than a “follow-the-instructions” game. However, there are still many more obvious problems that wouldn’t require completely redoing the game, so I focused on those issues.

The changes include:

  • Cards now sort as expected (most recent on top)
  • The documents now fly out from the side when opened
  • The documents are now labeled
  • The documents can no longer be interacted with through other elements
  • The game now uses canvas_items scaling, meaning the art and documents looks less crispy and more smooth

All of these things took me an afternoon to make, meaning it was relatively in the realm of possibility for me to have made these improvements during the jam. I would have also liked to juice up the game a bit, adding some dynamic shadow effects and more responsive UI and whatnot. But I didn’t have the patience for it, not for this game at least. In fact, I had so little patience for this game, I didn’t even play it sincerely while making this post-jam update. Actually, I still have never sincerely played this game, and I probably never will. And the reason for this is that the game is just really, really boring. There is nothing I can do about that unless I spent another two weeks fixing the game, time I’d rather spend on a different and better idea.

The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel, while certainly more fun that Moon Viewing, also has its fair share of problems. In fact, there are some very glaring issues with the web build of the game, so this update was mainly focused on fixing those.

The changes include:

  • Fix font in web build
  • Fix sound effects in web build stopping after a bit
  • Fix music looping incorrectly
  • Fix being able to grab cards between rounds
  • Add ability to reset game

Aside from these fixes, I feel that many of the problems in The Tower of Babel stem from the fact that it just was not realized anywhere near to completion; the version that exists is maybe 30% of the idea that was in my head. While making all the Balatro-like elements that were planned might be fun, it once again comes down to the fact that I would rather spend that energy on a new idea, rather than this half-baked game.

SUFFER.er

SUFFER.er is, at the time of writing, the most polished experience I have made within a jam timeline. After its post-jam update, I would consider Lapis and Rhubarb: The Orb of Doom the most polished experience I have ever made (once again, at time of writing). The only things I wish I could have done for SUFFER.er was to add controller support, make some text effects more dramatic, and add music to the epilogue. And that’s really it.

I did begin work on controller support, using the lessons learned from Lapis and Rhubarb: The Orb of Doom to help out. But I wasn’t satisfied with it. I was having the same issue that LaRtOoD has, where, even when not using a controller, one button is always focused. I know there has to be a way to avoid this, but I realized that I just didn’t care. SUFFER.er got first place in accessibility for its jam, it doesn’t need to be more accessible. It would be nice, but it’s just not really necessary.

After giving up on controller support, I looked around for anything I could fix with SUFFER.er that justifies an update. And I found nothing. So I didn’t actually post an update for it, and I likely never will. And I’m OK with that, since it is still a quite playable and polished experience, even if I can’t stand reading the dialogue.

What’s Next?

Did you catch the common theme with these updates? They are rushed, I only did things that were easy to do or were major issues that deserved the time. It’s almost as if I have something I’d rather be doing, and the truth is that I do. I have an idea that’s been brewing in my head since June, and I want to finally make it. I saw these updates as getting in the way of that. Although, I think if I didn’t have this idea, I likely wouldn’t have spent too much longer on these updates. I’m happy with where they are now, so I’m off to make my next game.

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