Thank's

Hi, I’m Zack. I am immensely astonished by and grateful for the quality of work that my friends have put into this silly jam in just two days.

There’s a whole goddamn eight of us credited on this, and most have never really made games before. Two of us, Ben and myself, have casual experience working on our own solo projects.

My intent was to choose gameplay systems that would ease participation among less technically-oriented friends, which is why it’s a bit visual-novelly, but still technical enough with the 3D dungeon crawling setup to keep it interesting. I felt that a pure visual novel could run into a too-many-cooks situation with even just a couple writers. If it were otherwise just me deciding everything top-down, and getting several of my more talented friends to add music and draw whatever I told them to, it would have never been as rewarding for them, or as instructive for me.

Although I went in probably imagining myself as some kind of project lead or creative director, I didn’t really have any such power, and I can’t claim responsibility for any of the real magic here. As a solo dev I could never have made something like this, but I’m also used to getting my way without having to debate my case or feel like a killjoy. Most of the time I ceded the creative vision to the forces of chaos.

You can see this in the way that nothing that ever got into the game ever got cut out – Garth from Wayne’s World was just a placeholder asset, for example. That’s very funny actually, and I think this was the best possible way to do it for this weekend, though I’m not sure you could ever manage a project like this in the long term. There needs to be either clearer boundaries of labor or a more strict chain of command. It’s hard for 8 friends to build something together.

And, yeah, that helps to explain any perceived difficulty in adhering to the theme, too.

That said, we had some very pro artists who are used to tracking and dividing up work, and were making incredible stuff without needing to be baby-sat, which is why, holy shit, I’m so happy with this game, against all odds of us even arriving at something playable before the deadline.

We had Andrew on music and some other very funny sound effect work, a little of Justin’s musical skills as well, Luke turning out original low-poly 3D models at a pretty insane pace in addition to 2D work and crunching on quite a lot of everything else, and Tess, Nick, Keith doing all kinds of insanely good art across the spectrum, from wall textures, to inventory items, cutscene art, and of course the lovely characters. My jaw dropped whenever some new asset got dumped into our Discord chat.

I ceded all the engine work to Ben here once we decided on using Godot, as I have no Godot experience and he his programming foundations are profoundly ahead of my own – the movement, camera, lighting, maps, doors and inventory systems, dialogue systems, etc., that was all him – and I simply scripted out the dialogue itself, contriving quests that could work with the characters and items that were sent my way, which… well, isn’t my ideal way to write, but I still had a ton of fun and laughed at my own jokes. Ben wrote a few lines here and there as well, especially where he had to fill in small gaps I left behind.

I would love to make more group-project games, but I often found myself wanting to divide the work up differently – I love prototyping mechanical stuff for myself even though I’m not suited to anything profoundly technical, and got taken away from that on this. I got a taste for delegating and being lazy, but I don’t think I can give up on solo projects, even when they’re shittier.

I also think I’m suited to working with smaller subsets of friends in different configurations, and found myself thinking about the various arrangements that would have gone more smoothly for me personally – this person with this division of labor on this type of game, and this group if I wanted to collaboratively develop a story that wouldn’t get out of hand, and so on…

So that’s my postmortem – the game is a masterpiece, everyone who participated is a genius and I don’t deserve to work with any of them, but if I did it again I’d do it completely differently! …Something like that.