[Music] hey there it's been a while after a lot of life changes over the last year I felt it was time
to get back into some game jams so when pirate software announced a game Jam in January I thought
that would be a great time if you don't know pirate software at this point you probably haven't
been following the Game Dev scene on YouTube or twitch lately Thor has absolutely blown up over
the last few months and it's been amazing to see pirate software is his Game Dev studio and with a
small team they have a game out in Early Access called heartbound which is a non-traditional
roleplay game that you should check out if you're a fan of RPGs the jam itself ran from January 12th
to the 26th which is a timeline I have grown to love way more than the typical 48 Hours don't
take that as me saying 48 hour jams are bad I just prefer a longer Jam nowadays because I don't have
to cram for 2 days and sacrifice time with family and friends to take part so I was all set and
ready for the jam and on January 12th the theme was announced and what do we have it's spreading
as someone who's taken part in a lot of game jams and seen a lot of the themes I liked this
one immediately it's super open to interpretation and there's so many ways you can take it of course
the jam started on a Friday which is a day that I currently do feedback Fridays on my live stream so
unfortunately I was preoccupied playing games made by the community and giving feedback and
advice then of course that night lady Lark and I had plans already so it wasn't until Saturday
that I really got to start thinking about the jam which is when my excitement faded a little bit and
everything ground to a halt the thing about a good game Jam theme is it allows for interpretation the
bad thing about a good game Jam theme is it allows for way too much interpretation and I found that
I could just not come up with a concept that I liked in the past I have jumped head first into
jams without a great concept for a game but those do tend to be the ones that I like the least so
this time I resolved myself that I was going to have a solid idea before I started it spreading
could be a lot of things and the first thing that jumped to my mind as I'm sure a lot of people as
well that lived through the last four years was a virus or zombies or or ideas and Concepts and
I pretty quickly realized I had no desire to make a game about those subjects the jamage does say to
think outside the box so maybe spreading butter on toast root system spreading underground weed
spreading in a yard and I kept going back to a game about curing letters that I played years
ago where you have to spread letters apart to the correct distance but unfortunately nothing
stuck out as something that I actually wanted to make or in the case of the letter spreading game
which I did like I didn't think it would be very engaging or memorable in a jam that brings in a
lot of participants this one having around 8,000 people joined it gets very easy to become lost in
the sea of other games that do something similar to you so I wanted to make sure I did something
that would stand out and people would notice or remember I legit struggled for 2 days I would sit
down at my computer write a bunch of Concepts and just hope that one of them would jump out at me
as like I want to do that at the end of Sunday I was talking with Lady lar about some of my
ideas and the one that I was liking the most was flipping the initial negative interpretation of
it spreading by spreading joy and happiness in an old folks home where you play as an animal going
around making them feel loved the a that's so cute that I got was the confirmation that I needed
to put more thought behind that idea one of the things I really like about the pirate software Jam
is along with your game you also need to submit a game design document at the end thankfully the
jam provided a link to a sample game design document so I didn't really have to reinvent
the wheel or anything I just took what was there deleted their content and started filling out my
own this is where the game started to evolve a bit as I marked down my Inspirations I wanted to
pull from it's going to be a stealth game where the new owner has banned pets from the premises
so the residents are sad you'll be playing as a dog or a cat where you need to sneak in and
give pets and love to the residents while avoiding staff and security cameras now personally I'm not
a huge fan of stealth games but one I did really like was Mark of the Ninja so I pulled the vision
cone mechanic for the enemies and figured that would work perfectly this would allow the player
to clearly know where they can and can't be at any given time but unlike Mark of the Ninja I didn't
want to make this a platformer so I decided to go for a top down game instead and all I could
think about in that style was the dungeon design in the Legends of Zelda or the room design in The
Binding of Isaac which is a heavily distorted top down view where you can see all four walls
of the room at the same time while writing out the rest of the document I came up with the term
retirement dungeon and fell in love with the name immediately so what if it's a retirement home for
elderly dungeon creatures like I said before I wanted something that would stand out and
memorable dungeon creature retirement home was just too good to pass up so off I went as usual
I'm using construct 3 for this project it's the engine I know the best and it's going to do what I
need here so the first things first I got player movement in next up we need some sad residents
that we can make happy and we're going to represent that by these red squares that will turn
green when they're given what they need it's going to end up being a really boring game if you can
just walk up to all of them without any obstacles so next I started adding staff with vision cones
that will walk around the St staff just follow a node system where each node has an ID number and
then I can set variables on the staff telling them which order to move between the nodes in and how
fast to do it they can have up to five destination points including the one they start on and when
they reach the end they just take the same path in reverse the next obstacle to add was locked doors
I'm giving the player the ability to pick up items which will also work towards some more complexity
in the game and I'm going to have some residents also not be happy until you bring them whatever
they need as well as getting a pet like a glass of water or medicine or glasses in the end those
are the only things a residents needed because I ran out of time but I digress I really wanted
secret passages in the game as well so I added a screwdriver item that can be used on vents this
opens hidden areas that the player can use to get to Residence that first seemed inaccessible
the last mechanic I had on my list was treats to make the player pet happy as well this way each
level can have two objectives one is to make all the residents happy and escape this will clear
the level and then you'll get a bonus star if you find all of the treats as well as well this way if
you don't feel like looking for everything you can still finish the level just making residents happy
and complete the game at this point we're 5 days into the jam but I've really only been working
on it for about two and I've already completed all the primary and secondary mechanics in my
game design document so I guess it's time for the really timec consuming part the art because
people can be adamant dog or cat people I decided I wanted the player to be able to choose which one
they wanted to play as then someone on my stream asked me why I didn't add a feret as well if
you're not familiar Thor has some adorable fets and they're a big part of a streaming community
and when you're making a game you should always know the audience you're making the game for so of
course it was an absolute no-brainer to add a fet as a playable character as well there's not going
to be a mechanical difference between any of the animals as I felt it would raise the scope a bit
too much for this the jam allows you to use any assets you have the legal commercial rights to use
so in an effort to work smarter and not harder I pulled a cat Sprite that I made a few years
ago for the stream avatars extension I use on my stream and as the creator of the art I definitely
have commercial rights to use it luckily it's cute and the right size so I used it as a base
to build out both the dog and the ferret this was a lot of fun but one thing I did not expect was
how difficult it is to make a fret I went back and forth for a good while because I just couldn't get
it to look quite right but I think it all paid off because in the end the Fret definitely is
the cutest one now I didn't have a whole lot of time to work on this project during the week so
for the next few days I just spent my nights after dinner and hanging out with Lady Lark drawing all
the elements I thought I would need I did curse past me a bit for choosing a distorted top down
perspective perspective's Tough Enough perspective in pixel Art's kind of annoying so I ended up
having to redo the doors several times but in the end I got it to a place that I found acceptable
and I started on the rest of the room design I definitely would have liked to have more variety
in the end but to not get lost in the weeds of art I decided that a stone room and a nicer room with
wooden floors would be fine it ended up taking me from the 17th to the 22nd to get most of the art
made animated and implemented into the game and at this point I ended up doing a huge disservice for
future me with how I built up the level there's areas like the door frames that the player needs
to move under and the hidden walls that need to reveal themselves which ended up being a nightmare
of layers and tile maps and objects to keep track of I chocked it up to a future me problem so we'll
get back to this later just know it's a mess but I did have a good-looking test level built out with
most of the art in the plan is to add more decor and whatnot later but there was still a lot to
do to make sure the game was fun as well as cute the next day I was streaming and showing off the
progress construct has this awesome feature that allows you to generate a temporary play a link
so I was able to share that with everybody in chat allowing them to play test and find bugs
which we ended up spending all day bug fixing this is really handy because from the editor
I can send the link watch any issues the player had then make changes and post a new link right
away it's probably one of my favorite quality of life features in construct honestly we found a
ton of issues that are hard as developers to find because we're too close to our games and we play
a certain way one issue we kept running into was that running was kind of just causing a lot of
problems I had it set up that when you would run the vision cones of the enemies would grow but it
wasn't really making the game any better it was a neat idea but the implementation I had wasn't
very good and I didn't really want to rework it so we turned the function off and then there was
really no reason to have a run button anymore so I just increased the player's movement speed
and remove the ability to run entirely this also helped simplify the controls now the player just
had to worry about the four directional controls and the action button which would be used for
everything else now we've reached the part in the development where we have to do the less fun parts
of any game menus level select and a saving system one thing I dislike in a lot of stealth games is
getting caught and having to redo the whole level again especially because they usually take a bit
while you wait for enemies to pass and such so I set the game to save its state whenever you make
a resident happy making the residents effectively checkpoints meaning that if you get caught you'll
only be sent back to the last one instead of having to play the whole level over again this
kind of quality of life editions are essential in game jams in my opinion same with the fact
that the player will be able to select any level without needing to unlock them first that way if
someone does get stuck they can just move on and still see the rest of the game I find this helps
keep the experience positive when people are sitting down to play many game Jam games in
a row it's amazing how fast time flies the game is in an okay State and I only have 3 days left
but of course that pesky life always seems to get in the way my parents were visiting from out of
state the 24th through the 27th and I'm obviously going to be spending a lot of time with them so I
got work done late at night while I could after everyone went to bed but progress was definitely
slow I tried to focus on level design which was a terrible process because I didn't do myself
any favors in how I set all of this up it looks good but it took forever and after two nights I
only had three levels put together at this point of course I was stressing out quite a bit and of
course Friday's the last day of the jam for me with it ending at 6:00 p.m. my time which means
that Thursday night I had to get everything finished it's been a good while since I've
done an all night grind to finish a game Jam game but sometimes you just have to do what you got to
do so after dinner that night I became future me and sat down to deal with all of the things that
I had left I started with trying to finish the level design because that was going to be the
most timec consuming part my original goal was to have eight levels in the game with a slight
hope of 10 but seeing as how I finished the fifth level at around midnight I realized I had to cut
my losses and just roll with that it's not really what I had hoped for but being realistic about it
having levels not feel so bare would do a lot more for players than having a couple extra I
made a bunch of furniture to fill out the rooms as well as paintings to disguise a sneaky hidden
room that you didn't need any item to access I made some more residents also so it wasn't
just the same ogre and tling over and over again the elderly Beholder is one of my most
favorite things I've ever made then after far too long of adding sound effects menu
art and testing I finally submitted the game around 4: in the morning and this is the final
result in in retirement dungeon you play as one of three animals trying to spread Joy
to the residence of an old folks home for Dungeon creatures but the evil owner has banned pets from
the premises you must sneak in and around the facility to get pets and bring needed items to
the residents unlocking doors traversing secret passages and collecting treats for yourself once
the residents are happy You Must Escape all without being caught by the staff or security
cameras overall I'm really pleased with this game as always there's a lot more that I wish
I could would have done but it's a game Jam game that's always going to be the case I'm writing
this script a couple of days after completing the jam and the game has been really well received so
far which I'm really happy about it's also brought in my favorite comment that I've ever received on
anything bad games don't let you pet good games let you pet great games let you get pet I think
I need to put this on a motivational poster but just saying that I'm happy with it doesn't help
with my design skills for the future so let's take a second to see what I should do differently
next time first for me it's the level design it's okay but I realized most of the secret
passages are just point to point and I should have had more Dynamic and alternate ways to get
around the levels rather than just going from point A to point B I just think it would have
been more interesting allowing the player to uncover more of the level and have more agency
in how they approach the traversal the enemy detection cones could have been so much better
in all honesty they're kind of terrible I'm just using a Sprite and a collision box which means
that they can see through walls and whatnot and I really wasn't able to add anything that you could
hide behind I thought about it a bit too late in the development to implement it so sadly I ended
up having to design levels around that as opposed to the other way which is making levels that were
more interesting definitely doing some sort of Ray casting vision would have probably been better but
this is where we're at there are also a few bugs that I didn't catch which kind of suck the most
egregious being that if you quit out of the level and back to the menu when you re-enter a new level
it doesn't give you the option to pick a pet what basically breaking the game luckily a Reload does
fix it and your progress is saved and the levels aren't locked anyway so you don't lose too much
but it's definitely annoying and kind of a bummer that's something I'm going to be fixing after the
voting period is over so it should be good if you try the game out now there are a few other things
that I wish I could have gotten done some more art as well I would have liked a little bit more Decor
everybody has a purple bed but you do what you can as one person making a game in two weeks so
that's the game I made for the pirate software game Jam 14 there's a link in the description
if you'd like to try it out for yourself leave a comment below about which pet you want to play as
I hope you had fun playing it and enjoyed seeing the process it took to bring it to life I had a
lot of fun getting back into a jam like I used to if you have any interest in seeing the game making
process Live come join me over at twitch.tv/ vmark you can also see plenty of other Jam Dev
Vlogs past and future on this channel so please subscribe and make sure to hit the Bell so you're
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last I took a bit of a break so the algorithm is not my friend at the moment so if you'd like to
help out and leave a comment below that would be amazing we're also so close to 100,000 subscribers
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supporters who stuck with me through my burnout period And I can't wait to get more fun content
to you all soon especially my video producer to your patrons like C the mess Nightfall matsi
Nazar Salim pixelator gadzi and War and Steven Rose you're all amazing and I can't thank you
enough thank you all so much for watching I'll talk with you next time have a good one
[Music]
later