Devlog #9 - It's released!

The ninth and final day of the Game Jam is done and…

I did it!

It’s live!

and you can play it here!

Today was a lot of big changes: I re-wrote a ton of scenes I wasn’t happy with, learnt how to use a new system called Calico, and implemented it into my game.

I also created an entire set of images! Hand drawn and scanned to my phone, then edited to create layers and load into Calico’s parallax image system.

Looking back at my to-do list, I managed to complete everything on here:

✅ Finish the last ending and bug test the code.
✅ Play each section and each branching story to make sure there are no hidden bugs.
✅ Actually play a start to finish game - it'll show me if there are any areas that feel rushed that I'd like to work on.
✅ Stretch goal: Do some drawings for some of the larger scenes.
✅ Stretch goal: Implement Calico, an add-on engine that will allow make the game look cooler.
✅ Write a draft for the itch.io page and create all the image assets, screenshots etc.
✅ Submit everything on time.

The bad:

Now I’m not delusional: It’s not great. I would say it’s… good? average?

• There are issues with the writing - I have a tendency to jump between past and present tense.
• There are also a couple bugs that I did not have time to fix - whoops!
• About halfway through I realised that I didn’t have the time to continue branching the story and so I had to massively reduce the scope of the game to pull the last 10 cards in the tarot into just two piles and force the story to go through one of the two piles.
• I also hand drew some stuff (including the lady on the game banner you see at the top of this page) and they are also not great. Drawing is not my strong suit at all. and I made some questionable decisions on the editing of it once scanned in so the art style looks… strange and now quite what I wanted.

The good:

Now it’s not all bad; I am super proud of what I achieved. I learnt a ton of stuff and it was a great challenge to jump into game development.

• This was the first piece of creative writing I’ve done in over 10 years… and I wrote a lot Over 7,000 words, in fact!

• I created an extensive branching narrative with over 200 choices that branch and flow to do different effects. Some are massive choices that take you to entirely different areas, or are small things like finding a weapon or not.
• I created 6 drawings and used them to create immersive layered images that move in parallax when you move the cursor (unfortunately they don’t move on mobile).

Overall, this was a really fulfilling experience and even if not many people play it, I’m excited for future me to look back at it fondly and remember the late night coding, or the random ideas coming to me at 3am and pulling out my notes app to jot them down. If you do want to play it, you can do so here.