Retrospective on Power Nap!

As this is the first Game Jam I ever take on as a solo dev, I felt like it was time for me to do my first Devlog as well. I'll mostly cover the timeline from the moment I joined the Kenney Jam 2025 to its submission, trying to show the game at the various states of development and some of the considerations that went into it!

Preparations for the GameJam

With work finished on my previous game for the month of June (I also take part in self organised monthly jams with friends) and no other games planned for July, I found myself with lots of extra time. As I was already looking forward to the Kenney Jam 2025, this extra time was dedicated  to set everything up. 

In no particular order, this is what I managed to get done before the jam start:

• Created a mock itch.io page
• Created a Github repo with automations to deploy on said mock itch.io page. From the get go I was planning on supporting Web, Windows, Mac, and Linux
• Setup a sample Godot project to test and configured it in its compatibility render
• Played around with some of Kenney's assets

Once confirmed that the deployment flow was working nicely, I sat tight and waited for the Jam to start!

Theme Reveal

On Friday 18th, at 1800 the theme of the Game Jam was revealed: Power

While that happened, I was at a restaurant enjoying the wedding party of a friend of mine. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as it gave me the time to ponder over the theme without having a chance to actually program anything... It is very likely that given the chance I would have committed myself to a project I wasn't fully convinced about!

The first thoughts at the theme were: "Huh, that's quite generic, everything can be a power!" and as such the immediate idea was to use a combination of "Power + other word" as my personal theme. 

While chatting with the other attendants at the dinner I considered the following ideas:

1. Horse Power ->  A game where you have to race against other, and you can gain extra speed by running over horses
2. Power Couple -> A game show where you and your partner compete against other couples to see which one is the best
3. Hidden Powers -> You're a super hero who forgot their suit. Now you need to save the city from various disasters while hiding from the population
4. Power Trip -> You're a manager in a small company and you're power tripping. You're goal is to get every employee to burn out by the end of the week
5. Power Nap -> You're an extremely lazy super hero, that can only fight for a limited amount before getting sleepy

As you can tell if you're reading this devlog, I chose the last! That was because the idea sounded fun, within scope and especially due to my expertise in naps!

Starting the development

Official development of the game started at 2100, and the goal was to get the basic movement of the main heroine to work. An easy task on paper, but one that Godot made unreasonably hard...

To put it bluntly, importing animations in Godot is HELL

Eventually I came up with a workflow that worked for me:

1. Add the .fbx file to the project
2. Double click on it and select the animation you want to import
3. Pick "Save to file" and make sure that the name of your resource ends with .tres (THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT)
4. Reimport
5. Delete the .fbx file 
6. Open an external editor and retarget all the animations from "/Root/Skeleton3D" to wherever you need them

With that out of the way, it was finally time to go to sleep!

Saturday

The day starts very well, with a good cup of coffee and quick progress being made. After figuring out the flow to import animations, I was able to quickly add the civilians and the aliens to the game!

Kenney Town!

The focus then shifted to create a city for the heroine to protect! For this, I used the Scene Tools plugin which gives many convenient ways to place your assets (much better than the GridMap at least!)

Lots of focus went into the lighting, considering the limitations that come with the Compatibility renderer in Godot. One easy way to get around it would have been to set the game in daylight, but the atmosphere would have been heavily hit by it. 

I also tried to play around with the LightmapGI node, but a bit for lack of experience and a bit for lack of proper UV2 maps the results were unconvincing. 

In the end, I limited the amount of lights and their visibility range with a lot of manual tweaking, and the the outcome was extremely satisfying!

Play Testing

At this stage, I felt comfortable letting others try my game. I placed a bunch of enemies and citizens around the map then sent a link to Zaibas1220. He provided lots of valuable tips, ranging from bug reports to gameplay tweaks.

Thanks to him I was able not only to serve the game in a bug free experience, but to also prioritise the items I still had in my TODO list. 

I'd say that this, together with the preparations before the jam, was the key that made this my best game yet (gamejam or not).

The rest of the day saw me implementing smaller features, bug fixes and a bit of effort in the itch.io page. At 2300, feeling content with the state of the game, I went to sleep

Sunday

As many experienced jammers know, Sunday is mostly used for polishing and not to add new features. What polish means differs from person to person though... And for me it meant adding cutscenes!

This turned out to be the funniest part of the Game Jam for me, as I kept laughing at my own voice lines. 

The intro cutscene turned out to be a key factor in directing the players when first starting the game, as a few friends had reported feeling a bit lost at the beginning!

I also added more voice lines for contextual situations like:

• Heroine getting sleepy
• Heroine waking up while still sleepy
• Civilians dying

And lastly, with a few hours on the clock, I decided to add a nice cutscene as an ending sequence where heroine and civilians dance while the credits scroll!

Take Aways

• Working with premade assets makes everything so much easier! Huge thanks to both Kenney and Kay for organising the jam and contributing with their assets to the game-dev community
• Preparations and Feedback are kings when it comes to get the best out of an idea. Especially in a time constrained challange like a Game Jam
• Voice lines can add tons of life to a game! 
• Animations import in Godot really need to be fixed...

Hopefully future game jams will turn out as fun and productive as this one!

If I ever update the game, you'll find the Game Jam version attached to this Devlog!