Post-Jam Postmortem: Part 2: Day 3 & 4

Intro

Howdy there!

First of all, if you haven’t yet read the first part of this post then I’d recommend you go and do that first. Honestly, it’s probably the more interesting post? Also, it’s got pictures of a real life shiba inu in it. But I’m neither a cop nor your mother so I can’t really tell you what you do. You do you, dude.

With that out of the way… let’s get down to business.

Day 3 - Monday [3rd of August, 2020]

11:28 PM: The car document view, populated with data

By the end of Monday, we had most of our planned big pieces for the game in place - a framework for future work, if you will.

This was our high-level strategy: get a fully playable game done ASAP (including not-super-critical things like a main menu) and then polish it as much as possible - while also adding the content-meat of the game too, of course.

In practice, this meant limiting the amount of different gameplay mechanics we added, while also doing our best to use what we did add in multiple ways.

For a good example of this kind of creative reuse, the credits:

Positives:

• Uses the existing dialogue system
• No new art assets needed - just throw a coat of paint over the main menu and call it a day
• Different from a standard credits scene - memorable!

Negatives:

• Extra time spent on writing dialogue for it

I really enjoyed going meta/fourth-wall-breaking with it and quite a few of y’all have specifically positively mentioned the credits, so that certifies it a success in my heart <3.

Credits, as seen in the online Yarn Spinner Editor tool.

11:16 PM: This bug is still funny to me - misspelled a variable that was supposed to show the make of the car. The horrors of stringly-typed code!

Day 4 [August 5th, 2020]

The days in the middle, with development in full swing - they kind of blend together. So, let’s talk about… polish!

5:38 PM: Call me Chance the Rapper ’cause I got the juice… just not on streaming services

This clip makes for a good showcase of some touches of polish in place by the middle of the jam:

• The documents open/close like a book, achieved by tweening the scale of the X-axis (0 to 1) and fading the entire UI Panel (0 to 1).
• The close button’s scale is endlessly looping back & forth.
• The odometer opens/closes with a tween that scales it along all of the axes (from 10 to 1) & fades the entire UI Panel (0 to 1).
• Dialogue has different colors for text & displays names for different speakers - and internal monologue is “spoken” by “Hmm”, which stuck until the end.
• Not showcased in this clip, but the game also fades-to-black-and-back between scenes, with the code that I wrote to achieve that just below:

“The ugliest hack that has ever hacked” bit was added at 0:54 AM, last night before the end of the jam, but the rest was mostly written on the 3rd day.

You might not even consciously feel it, but this juice adds a lot to the feel of the game and can be surprisingly easy to add, a lot of bang for your buck. This was actually the first time I had thought to use the DOTween Animation component directly, instead of using them via code. Good stuff, great library. The paid version gets you text animations too, which are excellent and well worth the money.

By the end of the fourth day, scene-wise, we were only still missing the ending (which ended up being basically the same as the intro, outside-of-shop scene) and the options.

We were light on content - still only 1 car image, 1 finished client image and a couple of scatterbrained stories - but this was just according to keikaku. (Translator’s note: keikaku means plan.)

For some reason angry_client_3.png never made it into the final product. Stay tuned for the DLC announcement!

End of part 2

There’s still some juice to be squeezed from this lemon of a “how we made this game” story, but this is where I bid you farewell for today, dear reader.

Come back next time for more reflections on our time in the trenches - and if there’s anything specific you’d like to know about then sound off in the comments, hit us up on Twitter or just contact us however you can reach us - just don’t show up at my door, especially in these times.