Post-Jam Postmortem: Part 1: Saturday & Sunday

Intro

Over the last week, Joonas and I (with some help from a few buddies) made a game for Brackey’s Jam 2020.2.

Presenting Rollback: Tallinn 1993!

It’s a visual novel kind of thing, mostly light-hearted, (hopefully!) humorous, takes about 15 minutes to play through and can be played on the web (best on desktop, fine on tablet, hard to read on a phone)

Give it a shot - and then come back and read on, if you wish to know how the sausage was made. If you’ve already played it, thanks! Hope you enjoyed it - let us know either way.

Now, about that trip to the sausage factory…

Day 1 - Saturday [1st of August, 2020]

We started off by getting together about ~17:30 to eat chicken wings - and to brainstorm.

First We Feast ™ (credit to Kerli for the photo)

“Rewind” had been announced as the theme earlier that day and we tried our darnedest to think of something unique, and not just a worse version of “Braid”… so we watched a few compilations of previous jam games (and were constantly super impressed!)

Some of the ideas/bits/themes that we thought of that come to mind:

• VHS cassette degradation due to constant play/rewind
• A casino heist or cheating game, where you’d have to remain undetected from cameras so that when the “Wait, wind that tape back” moment comes, you’d remain uncaught (still think this idea has some legs but we knew this would be require more art skills than we had)
• “Rewinding” a vinyl record to find backmasked songs with hidden messages
• “Eff it, let’s just make a level from ‘Braid’”
• Some kind of thing where you’d first play through a level in first-person and then later watching that movement from fixed-camera angles… and you had to match up with certain poses or angles in the first-person thing? Something like that.

At some point, Tanel came up with the idea of “rewinding” odometers on cars, which immediately seemed the right kind of absurd to me, so we ended up coming back to that idea a few times over those couple of hours and finally decided to go for it. (Thanks for the initial idea, playtesting & helping with a story on the game, Tanel!)

#squad: Luna in front, Joonas & Tanel in the middle, Rauno on top and Kerli taking the photo

Rewinding an odometer (more commonly known as “rollback” but apparently called “busting miles” in the US??? BUSTING MILES is 100% the name of my next arcade racing game) is seemingly still A Thing in Estonia even now, as evidenced by an article from 2018.

That first night we agreed on keeping the gameplay light - we were thinking of “Papers, Please” as the ideal end result for interactivity - and to instead focus on narrative, placing the game’s setting in an era that’s seldom (if ever? Please do let me know if you know of any!) covered in games: Estonia, in the early-mid ’90s, the first years of our re-gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We started off proper production in the last hours of that day - Joonas already created the first assets while I started looking into Yarn Spinner to power the dialogue system.

12:27 AM (technically on Sunday): “Pardon my art, but here’s a simple style test” - Joonas

… also technically on Sunday

Day 2 - Sunday [2nd of August, 2020]

None of us had personal experience with any kind of odometer rollback, but when I asked my dad, I got the reply that he had, in fact, experienced the opposite, back in the era we were setting our game in.

What had happened was along the lines of…

1. Take a machine from work
2. Drive it off into a secluded place (say, some nearby woods)
3. Add an entry to the vehicle’s log for, say, “Round-trip to Pärnu, 130 kilometres”
4. Roll the odometer forward by those ~130 kilometres
5. And finally… siphon the gas that should have been spent for that trip He also mentioned that a previous owner had actually made a DIY modification to be able to more easily access the odometer, via some kind of hidden compartment just behind the driver’s seat.

UAZ 452D, the machine from my dad’s story

Initial Yarn Spinner tests were promising, so we kept it as the core thing driving our game. Very happy with that choice even now! We used a lot of the parts as-is, but we also managed to tweak bits of their code to support our needs & wants.

11:27 AM: First recorded footage: Estonian folk heroes Aiku & Pets thrown into the sample provided by Yarn Spinner

The contents of the .yarn file containing the magic from the video above

7:48 PM: odometer rollback gameplay

8:27 PM: a discarded gameplay idea to make people click the car and have a red outline. Quite a lot of pieces of art already in there!

End of part 1

The first two days set us on a good path, but to keep some suspense - and to not chug all y’all’s browsers with the video embeds - I’m gonna call it a day here, for now.

See you next time for a deeper dive into two hacks writing some horrific hacks and much, much more!

Edit: part 2 is now available!

#squad_2: this time with Joonas taking the photo and Kerli making an appearance