We thought we'd do a little post mortem on this jam, while it's still fresh in our minds.

We initially had another idea that is nothing like the end result, a one panel game, were you would build up a wall defending a city in the middle, with enemies streaming in from the left, while you managed resources on the right. After a little playtesting however, we found that it was just becoming a very boring 1 dimensional tower defense. 

However, this took up most of the beginning of the Jam, meaning that wasted about 2 days and had to start from scratch.

After a bit of brain storming we got the idea to make a game where you manage resources on a large lumbering mech like machine while it walks through the world. When we started diving into the specifics of this idea, we found that the scope was probably to big, so we shifted from a large mech to a submarine, which would need less animations and art work. 

Next we started working on figuring out the gameplay and mechanics of the submarine, and our first draft was much more focused on resource management, surviving with the submarine while scavenging the environment. But when talking about the tone and feel of the game we pivoted more towards an exploration game, with limited visibility in deep water and a narrative that would take you through the game.

We picked a palette of 16 colors (plus black) that would form the basis of the art/tone for the game. We do this for basically every game jam, as it gives you good limitations on color usage, but also forces you to think about the look and feel in an early stage.

Initially you would remain in the submarine for the entire game, but as we started adding mechanics and features we felt that taking you out of the submarine on occasion would make you feel much more vulnerable. Unfortunately this lead us to develop 3 different player states, in the submarine, out of the submarine, and piloting the submarine. And switching between these states was a major headache during the middle part of development.

We used the Godot dialogue manager by Nathan Hoad to add in the story, but also to explain the controls and the functionalities on the sub's computer. This meant we could skip a lot of work on boiler plate code and functionalities we would normally have to write ourselves. We ended up using it for all of the game's texts and prompts, as any custom UI would take up too much time.

The first version of the level we made was way too big, and it took more than 45 minutes just to pilot the Eternity from beginning to end. We also found that we could only make a very limited set of puzzles and interactions along the way, so we scaled down the level some more to make sure that you wouldn't reach dead space with nothing to do for too long. 

After the initial level setup, we started playing through the game, refining the layout and adding additional content, such as an enemy, more puzzles, story beats and environmental art.

From this point on it was basically a race to the finish to add as much content in the remaining days as possible. We didn't manage to do any UI work except for the oxygen indicator, so we took some time after the submission was handed in to finish up on the UI, add some additional sound and art, and finish up any dangling post it tasks that were left open.

We posted the game on 4:00 AM on Monday morning (CET) 2 hours before the deadline. We had planned on an early night, but we broke the checkpoints code, and had to debug for a couple of hours. After loading from a checkpoint the multiple player states would wreck havoc and you would end up with an empty sub, and presumably a player somewhere far off in the level.

We feel pretty happy about the end result, as we had never made any attempt at a game with more focus on the narrative. We finished in 5th place, which we feel is a great result, as we wasted time in the beginning, and had to rush through the Jam for the most part.

In any case, thanks for playing!

- Team Merge Conflict