One More Wiggle: A Postmortem

Prologue

 May 2024: Harold Jam once again was on the horizon. I had just come off of making a game for the “Who Killed HawkZombie” jam, and while that game was a decent generic first-person experience one would expect from a game made in the engine, I had mostly been blindly following YouTube tutorials to assemble the game and didn’t feel like I really knew the engine. I wanted to make a sequel to last year’s Piggr, and while visual novels aren’t the first thing most people think of when they think of Unreal, the lack of technical complexity involved in making such a project means I would have ample time to focus on the basic principles of the engine, things like “how to get data from one object to another” and “how to make visual elements change based on variable values.” Thus, I set out to make a new adventure for Harold the Guinea Pig in Unreal.

A Whole New Engine

I wanted to jump right into making Harold’s next chapter, but there was a problem: I didn’t have a story! Hamster would once again handle authoring Harold’s silly antics, but between a full-time job and just needing time to put words to paper, it wouldn’t be ready immediately. I needed something to give my efforts structure, a goal to aim for, so I went with a story I had readily available: last year’s entry, Piggr.

With an engine picked out and a direction determined, it was time to get down to business and really figure out how to bend the engine to my will! As time went on, I progressively figured things out and the project grew…

And grew…

And grew…

Until it looked like something that would make the Flying Spaghetti Monster proud!

Production went impressively smoothly, and I had most of the story rebuilt by the time the month was half over. That was great for the Piggr remake, but I still didn’t have this year’s story! Hamster carved out some time and crunched out the rest of the story over the next few days, while I polished the Piggr remake and created a soundtrack.

A couple of important points on the story and the events leading up to its delivery:

1. In an effort to make the writing easier on herself and the technical side easier for me, Hamster abandoned the hub-and-spoke style of story pathing found in Piggr for a more linear format.
2. The Back button issues that had been present in the GDevelop version of Piggr were showing up in the Unreal version as well, and while I was successfully scrubbing them out it was proving to be a time-consuming process. I decided to not include a Back button in the new story to prevent possible bugs, and instead offer to send the player back to their last choice when they reached the end of an “incorrect choice” story branch.
3. Steel of Studio Blue looked over Piggr’s Blueprint code and suggested looking into data tables. This would later help streamline the process of implementing the new story into the framework.

Shake It Like You Mean It!

With just under 2 weeks left in the jam, I did the thing every smart dev does: start over.

It actually wasn’t as bad as you might think. Learning to use data tables meant that instead of making Blueprints that remind us of Lovecraftian horrors, I could quickly organize and update the story scenes using a spreadsheet.

Thanks to my prior experience with Piggr and the efficiency boost of my design decisions, putting together OnlyPigs went fast. I had the mechanics assembled and finished by the end of the week.

Now, at this point I had a story I could page through, but no pictures or music to go with it. With only 1 week left in the jam and over 90 scenes to illustrate, I had to scramble.

I would have liked to have made some unique full-screen artwork or even just make a new iteration of last year’s character art, but just getting the art done at all would prove to be a struggle. The week was a stress-fest in which I would copy-paste as much as I could to fill out the scenes. I got done with just a couple of days to spare, so I spent one day speed-composing a soundtrack with Logic Pro X. Thanks to loops, arpeggiators, and the “session drummer” feature I managed to whip up an appropriately-funky soundtrack.

The next day was dedicated to testing – luckily the only bugs I came across were a few images needing to have a filter removed. The final build was published many hours before the end of the submission period – a pleasant break from my usual last-minute crunch.

The Results

OnlyPigs went on to place #1 in Story and #4 in Comedy. I may not be able to take credit for the story part and only partial credit for the comedy, but Hamster is quite pleased with the results and I am happy that I was able to provide a platform to showcase her writing to the audience.

While there were no game-breaking bugs (not even any navigation oddities), one common complaint was how slow the “typewriter text” effect was for some players, even when that effect was set to the fastest possible speed. Since this is a relatively small thing to fix, I expect to have a post-jam patch made for it soon.

Also noteworthy are HawkZombie rating it 5 stars in all categories during the judging period, Ronaldbabe citing it as his favorite entry in the jam, and some rather impressive donations that made OnlyPigs my highest-grossing work.

Looking Back

A game jam philosophy that I have begun to champion is setting a personal goal irrespective of how you place, like learning a new engine or experimenting with a new game mechanic. As I said earlier, my goal was to better learn and understand how Unreal Engine works by making a visual novel, and I accomplished that goal. Shortly after the development period of the jam ended, I started work on another project and was able to function mostly independent of any tutorials or 3rd party advice thanks to my newfound facility in the engine. I have added Unreal Engine to the list of engines I am skilled in and will make more games with it as I continue to pursue mastery. As for Harold the Guinea Pig: who knows? We may yet see that chonky rodent wiggle his bottom back on to our screens again someday.

What Happened to the Piggr Remake?

Piggr’s Unreal port may be close to completion, but it will never see a public release. During the development period, I gave Hamster’s sister an early build, and she noted that there were some pretty heavy hardware requirements for such a basic game. She decided to take it upon herself and make a Ren’Py port of Piggr so it would have broader audience reach and a web build. That port is nearing completion, and will mark the fourth time Piggr has been ported. Have you ever heard of a completed game jam project with that many engine changes?

Into the Sunset

Thank you to everyone who has enjoyed our story of one rodent’s quest to win his partner back by wiggling his bottom! I hope it found a special place in your heart, just as it did for Hamster and me.