Posted March 19, 2026 by odderb
Hello :)
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Here is a little rundown of my experience making Final Frontier and participating in this gamejam. This is the earliest image I have of the game, taken on Thursday (I started recording late sorry!):
I start any game by setting goals, coming up with a basic design, and running through that all to make sure what comes out on the other side is semi coherent. I’ve been playing a lot of Dayz so was heavily motivated to make a survival flavored game. The inventory in Dayz also inspired be to try and make a slotted inventory. As far as a map I had decided I wanted to try and iterate on some proc-gen.
I struggled to think of anything related to the theme that wasn’t just sad (saving animals? I don’t want to force people to choose which animals to save [although some of you pulled this off well]). Then I realized it would be more fun to make the player decided who survives during a journey with an Oregon Trail coat of paint.
So thus the idea was: procedurally generated Oregon Trail. But how did this differ? Trains! You can manage fuel, add different cars which have more storage and can carry more people! Maybe even for combat you can swap out weapons on each car?! The ideas were flowing.
I spent a day created the map generator, which uses poisson disc sampling, triangulation, then dfs to generate multiple connected routes. After that we random place stops at each node. At this point the game was actually 2D, but I soon realized the art I can make for 2D (see my previous game) doesn’t really fit the tone I’m going for. So I switched to 3D.
To make the map not look completely flat we add a plane based “wind” and trees between all the rails. Since there is wind we also make the trees flow a little bit, otherwise they’re just static.
I integrated Dialogue Manager to help with events and setup a bunch of helpers to ease writing these events. As events were written I realized the scope was fairly insane and cut out combat and train upgrades. This let me focus on just writing events and balancing around that.
Unfortunately I’m not writer, so writing dialogue took a bit extra energy on my part. Additionally I wasn’t familiar with Dialogue Manager so there was ramp-up there too. While I was able to get a decent amount, I think the content could’ve had more depth and been more exciting had we made events permutations of smaller events, as opposed to single things (eg hunting is an “event” in code, that is attached to certain stops).
Regardless, near the end I was able to get into a flow and was able to get out quite a few events, and even a fishing minigame :).
The last day was spent fixing known bugs, making the unintuitive.. more intuitive, and balancing the game. My general attitude towards balance is that it’s pretty difficult to get correct in a jam (likely cause I can never scope anything properly), but with that in mind it’s better to make a game too easy as opposed to too hard.
Running through the game multiple times I discovered that fuel was harsh and you started too low. And without the intro “job” options you’d start with nothing and starve fast, which even from an “in-universe” perspective felt odd. Seemed like you were being setup for failure.
The reception is about what I expected, the game is nothing earth shattering, but people enjoyed it enough. I’m happy with that :) I improvised most mechanics and decisions and just wanted to have fun. I think there is something here so I’ve continued to work on this game since the jam, fixing the bugs reported (thank you thank you!!!!) and adding some features to smooth things out.
Thanks for sticking around and reading this <3