I made the tiniest, tiny game for a game jam. Also, goodbye for now!
Since I can think, I've done goofy things just for the sake of being creative and making something.
That started early, when I was just a little button, drawing these little comics with my brother that basically just copied the plot of the Star Trek films. We also started recording little radio plays, mostly horror stories that were mostly just copies of the Halloween movies. We made these with whatever we had at hand at the time. Need some random sound? Just hold a microphone to a speaker and play a sound file from Warcraft 2! Need music? We could use this weird PlayStation game Music 2000 and make a song in there! What was left on the tape in the end was not really what mattered.
We were kids, and all that stuff was very playful, coming from a place of not knowing anything about anything. But it seems like if you do that for a long enough time, before you know it, you will suddenly know a thing about a thing.
So game jams, huh?
Looking at that sentiment today, I feel like I'm tapping into it again when I participate in a game jam. This way of thinking gives me a bit of the courage needed to just put myself out there, with all the rough edges and the flaws.
I just made a tiny project for the O2A2 Visual Novel Jam. It requires you to make a short visual novel with a 1000-word limitation, one sprite, one background, one piece of music or ambience, and one sound effect. GO!
These limitations led to some frustration on my part in the beginning. I love polishing gameplay with all sorts of things that I could not do in this case. Like using ambience sounds and music in the game. I had to make a decision, so I chose to have only ambience. The jam also allows for a single additional sound effect, which was a little piece of sound design I used at the end of the game.
What the jam does though, is encouraging you to use other things for polish. Stuff, that happens in-engine, like particle systems, viewport rotations, zooms or UI elements.
I decided to go for something experimental and to just try out a tiny little idea I had, and I called it Laundromat Vertigo.
I wanted to make a game about these little moments in time where we reflect on ourselves and ask ourselves the question, "What am I doing with my life?". Let's get into that for a second. Don't read this passage if you don't want to get spoiled. Play the game here, it's free!
SPOILER FOR LAUNDROMAT VERTIGO.
So I feel like, even though the game is weird and experimental, that message seems to connect with people at least a little bit. Watching FlamezPlays playthrough and reading through one of the emails here, they are spot on about this weird trend of workplaces referring to themselves as "Family".
So is this a “good” game now!?
This is not meant in a self-deprecating or destructive way, I swear, but: Who cares?
It’s certainly a thing I did, that I’m fairly happy with. I don’t know about the rest. I'm sure, I could've done much more to make the game clearer, fix its structure, and think more about the choices in the game, but for me personally, that would go against the spirit of making a jam game and my own goals here. And in some ways, thinking like that would have probably led to me not even making this game.
I tend to be an overthinker and challenges like this really help me to unwind, change my pace and be a little more free with it all. I wrote about this sentiment a while back, when I reflected on writing the music for Snow Cone Serenade. I want to get away from the grid every once in a while and just express myself and finish something. I think that is a good skill to learn. So for me personally this jam was a great experience to learn and fight that overthinker a little bit.
Thank you!
There have been over 1000 downloads already, and I want to thank every single one of the players and all the cool little Let's Play videos! This unexpected number, which is certainly not a regular thing for me at all, just goes to show you that people seem to be enticed by horror games, creepy lint and psychological themes. Thank you for looking into the abyss with me a little bit! I hope you didn’t mind those rough edges. They are good for me!
To celebrate, I wrote some music inspired by Laundromat Vertigo. You should definitely put this on next time you hang up your laundry.
I need to go now.
And now? Now it's time to get back into space and make my first commercial project, called Nova Forever. I told you a little about it in my last blog. It's a point-and-click adventure game taking place in a space mall! There are so many things I would love to share, but I want it to be perfect, and I am still working hard behind the scenes to bring it to that level.
Sadly, I will have to slow down for a while now, because my other job needs me. I'll try to pop in every once in a while or tweet something, but progress will be pretty slow now because it will be limited to the weekends for at least the next half year. I will share more about the game when the Steam page and the teaser are ready to present the game in the best possible way.
