Play it here!

This 8 day long game jam taught me a lot. The game jam theme was 'Masks' and the Godot Wild Jam provides developers with 3 Wildcards to spice up gameplay. I picked the 'Friendly Ghost' and 'Skill Tree' wildcards as I felt capable enough to implement those.

I was team lead for this project, I tagged my fiance and friend to do the art for me. As the sole programmer I felt a ton of pressure,I started prototyping day 1 managing to get the combat working. Day 2 experienced a ton of progress aswell, including a Dynamic Music System, Skill Tree system and a Quest System. The days after taught me all about the difficulties of game development. Entering day 3 with an extremely positive mindset, I found a couple niggles that needed fixing, such as AI Pathing and player dash mechanics, I thought I would wrap up early that day since progress was actually moving too quickly... how wrong I was.

Day 4 had no progress since I had some errands to do IRL.

Day 5 onwards was absolute hell. I never realised how important actual content is to a game. I spent the whole day designing, redesigning, balancing, rebalancing each node in the skill tree, my perfectionism was starting to weigh me down. I would find a tiny little UI bug which I would spend hours tracking down, little did I know this would come to bite, very painfully.

Day 6, CONTENT,CONTENT,CONTENT. I was rushing to make the first level... yes first level of the game. All the mechanics and game system were in place I just needed to put them together. I had NO idea how long it takes to put toghether art in a level. It took me approximately 3 hours to get the first level to an acceptable state, however I was really feeling the pressure.

Day 7, MORE CONTENT! I managed to pump out the last levels for the game after a gruling 8 hour session, I was feeling so incredibly burnt out that you definitely started to see the drop-off in quality. However, I pushed through. OH WAIT! THE LEVEL MANAGER SCRIPT HAS A MAJOR BUG IN IT WHERE YOU CANT RESPAWN. Turns out I haven't died much during my playtesting, and turns out there was not a way to respawn yet (The code was there it just did not work...), so I typed so fast to fix this issue that I managed to give myself Carpal Tunnel but god damnit did I do it.

Submission day was mostly creating the itch.io page, getting the last bits of art implemented, fleshing out the story. And BOOM, uploaded. Me and my fiance playtested for a bit since we had an hour left before deadline and quickly changed some balancing to accomodate to less experienced players. And there we were, after an incredibly stressful week, we were finally done. The relief was incredible, and I was so proud of what we created, it was a fun, well paced, content-rich game with a cohesive story and ending. Something I had never done before. The skill tree system added so much depth to the game, the characters having custom dialog made the world feel alive. This project had taught me how to lead, assess, take on feedback, and program extremely efficiently (KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID). That motto had never really stuck with me due to my perfectionism and robust design, but this was a week long jam, so I had to put my desire for clean architecture to the side and get this MVP done!