2019 Summer #ue4jam

The Last Confession jam comments

2019-08-14T03:56:33Z

As the manager and the person responsible for the level/scope design of this project, I would like to say a few words about this project. Our game is very high on the narrative , and meaningfullness of the decisions that a player has to take, with even some easter eggs thrown here and there. The Last Confession is an innovative take on the theme of " Make it Count " in many ways, some subtle .. some very obvious. First is the plot, you have the one last chance to confess: I was aware, that many of my fellow devs taking part in this JAM would go for a shooter type game, because of the cliche plot of a character who has only 1 bullet, and he has to defeat many enemies or hit multiple targets with just that. So I pleaded my team to not do what everyone else was doing ... and to think out of the box. The Second way I implented the theme of Make it Count, is that each item is important, you have to make use of each and every item. You start empty handed, and you talk to NPCs, and go through their quests .. to gain an item. And no item is throwable or useless .. and is required to get the final ending (win condition). The Third way we ended up implementing the theme is, I made a small no of 3D assets and placed them in a way that make sense, and gives you a feeling of a actual town. As you can see from the layout. The art style we went with was non-photorealistic aka stylized style. The Fourth way to implement the theme was that each and every character has a meaning to his conversation. Like in an actual town, there are strong bonds between the characters, and talking to almost every NPC opens up options for some other NPC, which is required to complete the game. In short, almost every NPC (and talking to him) counts! The Fifth major way we implemented the theme was, that given that neither me or my partner Andgeno knew how to animate characters at all, then how to make the characters come to life? I planned for expressive sounds like 'hmm', 'sigh', 'huh' , etc .. that are character reactions to play that role. Given this was a jam, we didn't have time to record long dialogues for it given that we were heavy on text. On this part I would like to thanks the following members of my team: Ninjamin (Stave Dankerson)(Background Music & Male Voices) and his roomate Zoe Foster (Female sounds) and special thanks to Wister (who had to quit midway due to a family emergency) for getting together a excellent soundtrack. And when Andgeno , who was responsible for coding into blueprints everything on his own ( since I don't know how to even properly move around the camera or place objects in UE, being completely new to it )... added the audio assets to the game... It breathed a sense of fresh life in all the ragdolls. The ragdolls, ended up giving a feeling of how tasteless and colorless is life when you are helpless in a romantic situation. Ofcourse the project is not polished in some ways, given it was only the 2 of us (1 for art, 1 for blueprints alone) for the most part of it, after 13 people joined the team and dissappeared without doing a single drop of meaningful work including the person in whose team me and geno had signed up to participate in our first jam (we are strangers to each other)... And top it all of, my own internet stopped working when 6 crucial hours were remaining for the the jam to end .. and we barely managed to submit .. with 2 minutes remaining on the clock. I believe afterall, we did a very good job, and I appeal to the Judges to consider these points in their final decision.