Back in May, an aquaintence in Game Dev Galaxy, a queer dev Discord I’m involved with, put out a call asking for artistic help with a jam game because the original artist had to drop out. Ve had actually been talking about this jam for a couple of weeks already so I was familiar with the concept, and somewhat interested in joining, but I was held back by the thought that plenty of other people would have volunteered to join up and the fact that I had never actually made a game before. I had illustrated the cutscenes that went into Inspector Waffles, sure, I’ve played around with Unreal Engine too, and all the way back in high school I’d fooled around a little with Game Maker following guides to make pinball games, but I’d never made an original, finished game before and certainly never with a team. All I can do is draw, and who really needs that?
When the call went out specifically asking for artists, I jumped on it. A call like that meant my skills would actually be desired. I crafted a very careful response to offer my services. I was very open about the fact that I had no experience making games or working with Unity, the engine the team had decided on. I explained my talents, my interests– I really wanted to focus on environments since I’d just been turned down from a job in part because I had no environment experience –and I made sure to clarify that it was okay to turn me down for not knowing how to do anything, I didn’t want to force any pressure. The response I recieved was, to me, basically, “What are you talking about? This is a game jam.” It’s a volunteer project for no pay and no one on the team knew Unity or had made many games before. Of course I could join. That’s how I joined the team for Bowerbird.
Bowerbird, which is now available for free on itch.io, is an adult game made for the Anti-Romance Jam, a game jam seeking stories and experiences that were about not just the lack of romance, but the opposite of it– however that may be defined. I think the tagline for Bowerbird puts what it’s all about the best: “What if a romantic and sexual relationship ISN’T an unambiguously good end goal? Maybe it would be a whole can of worms to get with your crush who’s your boss in fact.” It’s a story that follows Sen, an architect, who is trying and failing to build a palace for their client, Prince Lanu. The Prince’s unreasonable demands cause Sen to have nightmares over trying to build the palace where they are attacked by manifestations of the Prince’s demands like koi fish with spears and armed statues. At the same time however, Sen is also dreaming about the Prince… In a very unprofessional fashion.
The game takes about 30 minutes to play according to all the time I spent playtesting the dungeon portion on which my work was almost exclusively focused. As proud as I am of having finished the game, I can’t give playing it my full recommendation because the combat and level design can feel pretty challenging in my very picky opinion (it’s what happens when you only have 2 months and one single programmer who was doing god’s work the whole time). The game’s writing is also very explicit, as you will be warned upon opening the game if you decide to download it, so be aware of that if you do want to try it out anyways. If you do check it out, thank you! Please consider leaving a rating and comment on it, I think the rest of the team would really enjoy that.
So all of that said, how was making and finishing the game, now that it’s all done? Put simply, it was a lot of new experiences. Firstly, the team had 6 members, officially making it the largest project I’ve coordinated with people on (at least directly). That actually didn’t turn out to be too difficult to handle, as we all had very specific skills and focuses, what work went to who was pretty clear, and if people were able to assist or carry some load, they knew who to go to when asking what they could take on. The group was very agreeable and fun to work with! It was also the first project where I was brought on as an artist, but was able to have a tangible effect on how the project was managed. I pretty quickly and naturally moved into a project assistance role, a role which I’ve known I enjoyed for a while now but until this project didn’t realize the extent to which I was trained and experienced in this type of role (suddenly I understand what my experimental, business-styled high school was all about). This is also, now that the project’s done, the first time I’ve gotten to deal with the other side of scope-creep, but I’ll get into that more later.
What went well with this project is first and foremost the fact that we were able to finish it! I’m extremely proud of all of the team members for getting here because mentally, emotionally it’s hard to get to this point from nothing but a dream. Despite at least half the team having to leave for a good portion of the project for summer trips and vacations, everything still got done because everyone was so great at judging their own abilities, communicating what they could do, and open about when they needed help or had to bow out on something. This was helped by our coordinated effort to get extra organized at the start, by agreeing to weekly group meetings, doing daily check-ins, and having a resource and reference wiki and task board hosted on Notion. I like to think that I also did an excellent job stepping up by making meeting agendas and notes. Through those, and by referencing everyone else’s progress updates, I was able to come up with smaller, rough deadlines for the group with more specific goals in mind. For instance, one deadline I suggested involved having the most basic version of the combat loop where it was able to switch back to the visual novel portion of the game upon death (a feature that ended up cut for time, but switching between the two forms of game at the beginning and end remained). For the most part, the deadlines were not met, almost always due to unforseen bugs or incompatibilities in programming popping up, but if it weren’t for those mini-deadlines, I don’t think we would have been able to get the game polished and submitted the day of the real deadline, so I’m proud of myself for pushing for those!
There were, of course, also a lot of things that didn’t go so smoothly. The concept of the project was big and ambitious, and for a group of 6 with just under 2 months to make it, just about everything had to be cut. The original concept for this game was that it would be an interactive dating sim kind of in the vein of Hades or Boyfriend Dungeon where you go back and forth between visual novel and roguelike, dating love interests during the day and fighting monsters to gain inspiration for your work at night. When you died, you would wake up and talk to whoever you were working with in the real world, and whenever you beat a boss in the roguelike, it would progress the real world storyline. There could even be multiple people that you dated while working your way up to the Prince, who was still the primary goal. This, of course, was immediately recognized as being way too big of a game to make in two months, so we were aiming for a demo or prototype instead. The demo would just have the prince– less writing and less characters to design, and would be just the palace garden, and would end with one boss fight.
Over time that shrunk to lose the ability to go back into the visual novel portion upon death, the combat wouldn’t be roguelike anymore and would just be the same persistent abilities you have each run, and there would be no boss monster. It was demoralizing to see the image in my mind of what the game was going to be get farther away, but the cuts made sense. To go back into the visual novel was going to make way more work in both writing and narrative design for the writers, and it wasn’t working out great in programming when the cut was made. A boss was going to require both a monster design and an attack pattern– the artists were both booked up and no one really had ideas for how it would attack. As for the roguelike, it wasn’t designed at all.
It maybe could have been the case that all of these things made it in, but to do that I think we would have needed to reprioritize our work for this project from day one, foresight no one on the team could have had. It wasn’t until we were a month out from the deadline that it started to become clear that the team was split between working on two completely different games. One was the visual novel and narrative, which the writers and other artist were focused on, and the other was the roguelike which was myself and the programmer (the audio person had been busy up until this point). There was a logic to the split, the narrative was going to inform everything else about the game, so it was being sorted out first so that the rest of the game could be built around it. The characters, environments, and enemies were all wrapped around the setting and events that would take place, and their form and action in gameplay would follow that. However, roguelikes, as common as they are, are not simple to design. A typical roguelike involves a large number of different weapons and playstyles, a variety of enemies that behave in interesting and unique ways, levels that are interesting to traverse over and over while still feeling fresh, a reward system that keeps a player wanting to come back,and on top of all of that, it needs to be delicately balanced to be fun but still challenging. We didn’t even have a single attack or enemy yet, and we were running out of time.
We had several meetings dedicated to trying to figure out what to do with the roguelike, each one paring down what we would and wouldn’t include, but none of them making that much progress in making something exciting. We came up with the mechanic to build new rooms as if you were dreaming up a new wing of the garden which became the pillar we wanted to build the rest of the mechanics around, but the rest of the mechanics were still nebulous. What were rewards? How would you get them? Attacks were designed, but we couldn’t agree on whether you keep or lose them, or if you got to choose one from the start. As more time passed and the deadline drew closer still without a playable game, it was finally suggested by someone that we don’t make it a roguelike at all. It’s just a dungeon that you can build and has enemies in it, and you’re building to get to a few specific areas before you reach the exit. You build rooms once, get rewards once, get attacks once and everything is persistent if you die. Once the actual roguelike was taken out of it, it started to feel like the game had wings. The dungeon building system got finished, enemies were put in, rooms got designed, and soon the game was something that could be played and tested! And play and test I did. The day of the deadline, we had until 10PM to get the game in, and with nothing else to do that I could help with as an artist, I played through the full game at least 5 times to make sure it was all working. I’ve probably played it more than anyone else.
Getting to play that game and being the first one to genuinely finish it felt like a breath of fresh air. After two months of hard work and uncertainty, the game existed and could be played from beginning to end. Even if it had some hiccups and was rough around the edges, we’d all finished the game together and that felt amazing!
In between playtests on that last day, as I was waiting for new builds to be pushed I kept myself busy by putting together the thumbnail image and write up the description and credits for the itch.io page. While I did that, I couldn’t stop daydreaming about what I would work on next. The ads for upcoming jams on the website didn’t help. So much of my time was taken up by this jam between drawing and coordinating things that I was hardly able to get any of my own work done. I’m excited to get back to that and get to sharing some of the stuff I’ve been working on since this spring, but I’m even more excited by the idea of making new games for new jams. Getting to work with people is so exciting when it’s on something you all care about and are invested in. I’ve rediscovered my lofe for project management too, and I know that I’m able to support people in whatever way they need to be able to push a project through to finish. It’s such a rewarding feeling to get something done!
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