Pre-Post-Mortem

Phwoof! Got THAT done. I'll make another one of these once the judging is finished and all but just wanted to get my initial thoughts down post jam.

Where to begin? I was not planning on entering the Jam, I was fully set on entering the compo but this concept full got away from me. And it wasn't even the time travel element!

If you want to look at the files, 0.1 is what the project was like last night so you can see the DRASTIC amount of polish and content that I made in the past day. I had no idea what bugs to fix as well because my two playtesters both killed the robot and then thought there was nothing left to do, missing out about 95% of the content in the game.

But before we get into content and all the wonders that word brings, to give you some backstory I actually worked on a concept 3 years ago when I started learning Unreal. It had the exact same title (which is why I was so happy I could finally use the pun) but was meant to be a GTA-style time travel sandbox with fully simulated cities down to the exact time! This concept was... lofty but I managed to figure out the basic mechanics in Unreal, but didn't get much further. Nevertheless, when the theme came up and I got the initial idea for a DOOM-style FPS where you have to time travel in order to keep your past self alive, I decided to revive the concept. Had to write all the code from scratch and for a completely different engine but that is why the actual time travel element of this game, while it certainly cuts a few corners here and there (LITERALLY, your past selves will cut corners!), was fairly simple to implement and is fairly robust.

It was the REST of the game that proved difficult to realise.

I think I can safely say that this is my first Narrative-Driven game. Haven't done English since GCSEs but I'm always writing stories and screenplays so I figured why not let it translate into my games for once? Outside of a poem or some flavourtext below the screen, that is. It was certainly an experience, enjoyable one at that. My humour is kind of out there, so I don't know how many people will enjoy it, I definitely think I went a bit overboard on jokes-per-minute but I hope the majority of the bug-fixes over the next week  are just fixing my bad grammar and spelling instead of removing jokes because people hate them.

I found a tutorial last week that let me translate Twine dialogue trees into Unity and this was my change to test it out! Probably should have practised with the concept before doing this jam but heyo what's 3 hours of bug-fixing? Or the countless hours that I might've saved if I had implemented the dialogue system more robustly to start off with. I certainly think that the main source of "jank" or lack of polish comes from the dialogue system. There's a couple times you can't quite see all the options and characters who are dead tell you they don't want to talk to you. Twine manages its dialogue with conditions and variables and all these lovely things that are very difficult to pass from a text file, so I didn't and tried to manage it all manually. It's functional but severely limits the things I could put into the game. I wanted the Narrator to have extra snarky voicelines if you managed to kill Past Martin by accident. Because it was originally a DOOM-clone, I wanted you to have a Gun and it could be used on any of the characters but these would have lasting effects, unless it was the Robot or one of your Clones. I even thought an entire combat system would be fun 0_0. Lots of silly jokes or extra dialogue trees had to be scrapped because I didn't have the time to go through the laborious process of adding them or because implement a scroll-bar so that you can see more than 3 1/2 options at a time, was so far down on the priority list that it just never got done.

That being said, damn there's a lot of content in this game! For a jam game, I mean. 7 NPCs, 4 puzzles, 2 items, different ways to solve every problem (except for getting the band back together). So much of it is completely optional and, aside from the ending which you're locked into, you can go back in time try and find all of them! Jam games are notorious for great concepts and very little content, unless procedural or fairly simple level design. I'm glad I've got a good concept and a good amount of content, perfectly balanced as all things should be! I actually started this game with the idea of having 3 levels to choose from and, if I get a good response and decide to develop it further, that would certainly be my main goal going forward, further level variety.

Of course all this content meant I had to write all those dialogue trees, make the entire layout, design the cutscene generator, write the narration, record the narration, edit the narration. It's a lot of stuff to do for just one guy but I am so proud I did it! I'll often say to my friends that Daikanriden is my favourite of my games and while I still have a soft spot for it, Back Four Seconds definitely gives it a run for its money!

And I'm so glad that I can say that about a game that actually looks really good! Taking a similar 2.5-3D art direction as The Last Kart, I kept the DOOM-Clone aesthetic but mixed with more modern graphics to create this really nice ethereal old-but-new style that I really, really, hope people dig. I mean people might just hate it, which is entirely fair but I still think it's impressive that I got as dull a location as an Office Block to look so cool! The pixelated aesthetic worked really well to sell the whole thing, though I do wish I could have kept it on the UI. Sadly my method for reducing the resolution was to use a RenderTexture which you can't interact with UI through? I tried dozens of solutions but I either had low-res graphics with high-res UI or all high-res so I think I made the right call. At the very least, you can easily read all the text now, so I'll probably reduce the text size in the next update so everything fits nicely.

Making "the look" of the game ended up being the least time-efficient part of it all. The content did take the longest to make but fiddling around with shaders and looking up tutorials took at least 50x as long as it would have if I knew what I was doing first try. It has inspired me to use these more complicated techniques in my future work, but now was not the time to learn them. I hope you all enjoy the timeline effect, even though it's nowhere near as cool as I wanted it to be...

Oh and I was going to spend precious hours today making music, something that I've never found a good way to do outside of synthesizers and samples, when my friend Jacob (J-ZERO) offered to let me use his music which I was going to use as inspiration anyway! His LP is based off of looking at the past through the lense of video games so it has the same feel that I'm going for. He's really good, check out his stuff in the future!

All in all, definitely the most stressful and down-to-the-wire jam I've done so far, but nevertheless still incredibly fun! I hope to have less jam-y and more official releases on this account to come!

If you really want to see something added to the game, have any questions or just want say what you thought about the game, leave a comment down below!