The Book of Good began as my third submission to a game jam.  I have been using game jams to develop skills and to see if I can produce a commercial release.  

I have never considered doing a horror game before, and I have only played a few in my life, so the game design process required that I play more and look at YouTube play videos.  As I reviewed that content, I set up Trello for project management tasks.

The game jam (Scream Jam 2023) turned out to be a tight deadline for me.  I work a fairly intense schedule and have a family.  I had to schedule mornings before my wife woke up to do all the design and the programming.  I timed the entire process and the initial entry took me about 36 hours.  The current version has taken that time to 92 hours of work over 1.5 months.  I decided to time what I could do to see how long it actually takes me to design and develop a small game from start to finish.  Its a lot harder than I thought it would be.

The one thing learned that I will keep doing is to rapidly prototype and iterate.  I have been very stuck in the past doing too much and never releasing.  The game design process for game jams enforces having  limited scope, limited time, and limited features to start.  It prevents scope creep and long development times.  I am practicing to make that the rule for how I develop.

For The Book of Good, I decided to use Unity Asset Store assets.  I have read over and over about asset use, flips, and making assets your own.  I respect everyone's positions on this topic, and for me, I have decided that for speed of development, I am comfortable repurposing assets from the store, including taking elements of the asset demo scenes to put into the game.  The mansion in the Book of Good is such an asset. I took some of the Synty assets and did a mash up with several of the asset sets they developed.   I also used low poly versions of the Infinity PBR assets that fit well with the Synty style, and Polyperfect assets for the spiders.  In order to get the right look and feel, I added post processing from an asset store package (I had, and have little idea of how to do that on my own yet).  I love the way the look turned out.  The bottom line for me is that in order for me to develop at a reasonable pace, I will probably stick with mash up process for the assets I use.

I also found free music, and purchased some horror game sounds.  Until this development cycle, I had not realized how important the right music and sounds can be.  I would say for sounds and dialog, I need to learn more and improve more, but the ones I chose work well enough for now.  I love the music I chose for the background sounds.

This was my first attempt at actual dialog. Not just written, but with actor voices.  Because the hero is a young woman, I thought I could convince my wife to record her voice.  She wouldn't do it.  So I named the character after her and used Replica Studios to produce and AI voice.  I have mixed feelings about the results, but it was an option I stuck with.  And it sounds nothing like my wife.  AI voice is useful, but it is far more limited than I originally imagined.  Replica is a good choice.  It organizes the actors and voices in a very convenient way.  It can use some better inflection editing.  In my next game I will try a different text to speech option to see if I can get a better result more easily.

For the programming, I used the Game Creator 1 asset.  I am a capable programmer, but chose to try this visual scripting method in all three game jam submissions.  I stuck with this for The Book of Good because the thing Game Creator 1 does best (in my opinion) is that character set up is lightning fast, and the Trigger system and dialog system make it easy to organize events for a horror game.  What it didn't do well was to create a workable 1st person controller.  Third person has been great for me.  1st person with this asset is wonky if you are not careful.  In my game jam submission, it was the big thing that I should have been more careful with.  I spent a lot of time fixing that.  It is funny that when you develop a game, you start to not see the wonky things.  Other people testing and commenting was critical to me seeing what I did right and did wrong.  I was lucky enough to have a streamer pick up the Jam entry and play it online.  I learned more from that viewing than anything else.

The hardest part of this game dev journey has been committing to a release.  I have dabbled in game development for many years, but only recently put myself out form comment in game jams.  I could never get comfortable with the concept of "Good Enough" over "Perfect".  Game jams have been the most beneficial learning experience and I should have done them so much earlier, because I am more comfortable with "Good Enough".  The other hard part has been justifying the time and spend to do this work when it can take time away from other things--particularly family.  Despite the hard parts, I can say that it is a hobby that I truly enjoy, and I hope it will eventually develop into a solid secondary income stream.

My next step is to figure out Steam pages and the process of advertising a game.  I am putting myself through the entire process so my next game developed can have a more organized and seamless process.

Thanks for reading about my journey, and I thank all the developers on this platform who inspire me to keep going.

-CannonfodderGWM