Hey all, Jam is pretty much over now and KÖNIGSHAUS is out!
I pretty much wrapped up the work with a week to spare and spent a few days just polishing a bit more and looking for bugs.
I was only going to spend about an hour per day on this but in the later half I did get very invested in finishing and polishing so I did spend a lot of my free time on the game.
Its been interesting working on something more horror adjacent, I really have no idea whether I succeeded in making something scary, I also knew that going too hard on horror would have been a bad idea for this jam so I tried to find a good middle ground, I generally hate jump scares and cheap horror tropes so I tried to avoid that and make something that is more about an ambient sense of dread and atmosphere, Chibenobi's music helped a lot in that area.
I went into the project with very vague ideas regarding the plot and even the mechanics, I just wanted to get started on something and then vibe my way into something interesting, I feel like I mostly figured it out, I had a few ideas early on that I stuck with throughout the whole dev period, I knew how I wanted the game to end and I knew how I wanted the character art to look like.
I think the gameplay could have been more complex, I had some ideas for physics puzzles early on but it never went anywhere, I think its maybe been my weakest link in most of the jams, mechanically I tend to keep things very simple, with the hope that I can instead have a fairly polished and enjoyable experience, perhaps that's something I focus on changing next year.
When I started I wasn't sure if I was gonna commit to a full game, as enjoyable as the jam has been the last few years I usually feel very exhausted by the end, partially because I commit to very ambitious games with a big team and mostly because I already work on games for a living so its effectively a 12-14 hour workday for a whole month, but it's always been worth it in the end as these jams are my favorite time of the year.