Postmortem

I had a blast making this sad, sad project and really pushed myself to do all I could in two weeks while still maintaining my life (sorta). This is the largest project I've made yet in terms of everything: length, scope, graphics, locations, writing, and audio. This is also the first time I've implemented voice overs and I couldn't be happier with the results of the incredibly talented people I had the pleasure working with!

The voice overs ended up being a major factor encouraging me to see this through to its current state, to make sure everyone's amazing work and efforts got used to their fullest potential. A lot of jams, the fatigue will set in towards the end and I'll feel OK about disregarding some things because the efforts are typically all my own.

Things I think turned out great:

-Audio & Voice overs

I'm used to making my soundtracks the foreground of the ambience. I had to adjust my typical approach, so I wouldn't overwhelm the presence of the VOs. Each track produced needed to not have a demanding presence, rather they should support the VOs and not absorb the player's attention. After I had the vibes of the tracks down, they all grew dynamically quieter, softer, and less intense (except for the final nightmare --anxiety!).

The atmosphere of this also couldn't have been achieved without freesound.org. It helped add such depth to the layers of the game. The final nightmare in particular, almost every interaction has a 3d sound accompanying it that I think really helped plunge the player into the moment (Alex's stomach rumbling makes my stomach rumble). I feel the need to donate due to the strain I put on their servers. In fact, they even sent me an email to compel me to. That's a first. "Hey, we noticed you been downloading a fuckload of sounds." Yeah... that was me.

The track I'm most proud of is the one played in the ending credits. Yeah yeah it sounds just like a silent hill song, sorry, but I think it's awesome. Musically, my background is centered around progressive technical death metal, so writing simple dad-rock type songs isn't really my forte. I initially wrote it mid-jam after a restless attempt to sleep. I got out of bed around 3 am, feeling the need to produce something and boy am I glad I did. The themes from this ended up becoming the main menu theme, which I thought really helped provide some closure to the ending. When Maya sent me her vocal tracks, I couldn't believe how stellar her performance was! It was even better than I had heard it in my head.

-Character designs

I suck at pixel art. My own character designs typically reek of immaturity: three colors, no shading, crudely shaped. The process I used for these character designs was incredibly rewarding and I'm likely going to use it again, maybe with a slightly higher resolution next time around. These characters were created in Fuse and uploaded to Mixamo. I found animations where I posed the characters and screenshotted them. I pasted these images into PyxelEdit and took them down to about 1/10th of their fidelity, removed the empty space and made some crude 4 frame animations of these images. Yeah, I know there's shaders and such I could have done this with, but I think this process lent quite a style to the characters and animations that shaders wouldn't have accomplished. It also made them fun and easy to animate how I saw fit. Alex's tummy got real small for her final pose. A knife in Emily's hands and a little arm wiggling with some red scatters and boom, stabby stab stabs.

-Characterization

The voice acting certainly brought all these characters to another level. Over the years, I've tried to make my characters more 'real,' as opposed to when I'd just make them good, evil, crazy, or whatever. It's so easy to make a character 'good or evil' because then there's your hero or your villain. It's pretty lazy writing though. A bit of a cop out here though as I have the typical drunk, misogynist dad. Outside of that, I like to believe all these characters are driven by motivations, not that they are simply good or evil, even if Billings seems evil as fuck initially. They all have pasts and futures, identities of their own outside of whatever story is here. The tricky part is showing what those are without being like "I'm looking for my sister" or "I want to have sex with you" or "I'm not from this dimension" or whatever, to allow the dialogs to tell you these things in a manner not so direct, one that resembles how people would actually speak.

Of course there is more I wished I could have accomplished that got de-prioritized for various reasons, time constraints above all else. I wanted to make sure every thing in the game had a high quality, rather than input as much content as possible.

I feel the 3d environments weren't as suited to the setting as I initially thought they would be. The home and the diner in particular never quite came together the way I wanted them to. Maybe an orthographic perspective would have been more appropriate, or maybe using more 2d art in the 3d environments would have helped the characters and environment feel a little more cohesive.

Another factor which I hadn't been ready for was the lack of ability for simple rewrites and additions, due to the demand I'd put on those who volunteered their voice talents. I've grown so accustomed to adding or adjusting dialogs through development that I hadn't really thought about how absolutely airtight the script had to be when I sent it to the voice artists. Whilst I'm so very pleased with the result, I've definitely learned how important it is to refine the script. I didn't have the finale completely written when I initially sought the voice talent, and regret it, for I felt a little rushed to get it out the door to them once I had finished writing.

I initially implemented a complicated variable system that got no use. I had a system to track the player's personality traits (around 20) based on their choices (i.e. curiosity, narcissism, trustworthiness, empathy, "the big 5", and many others). For example, you can interact with the trash can up to five times depending on how you play. Each time your curiosity would increase. If you grabbed the shoe without the gloves, your risk-taking and impulsivity would increase. If you declined to help find the shoes, your humility would decrease. I initially planned to use these variables to make decisions for the player later without their input. The further along I got, I ended up scrapping these plans due to the workload I had already placed on myself. The system still exists in game, although it has literally no effect on the gameplay or story. Maybe next time...

In my original outline for this project, Alex was actually the main character and the story took place over five days. Alex was male too. I didn't like him that much. His struggle didn't translate well into my initial opening, requiring far too much exposition and constant introductions instead of existing relationship dynamics. I also considerably overscoped the amount of locations and dreams over these five days, but that allowed me to see where I had another story within it all. The only existing pieces of the original script are Emily and Alex's interaction within the diner, and the opening dream sequence. Billings and the Stranger were present each day, but they didn't really have the stage presence or character that they do in this version, more tertiary than really involved. Rachel made an appearance later in the story, and she was... quite sinister to say the least. Mark played a recurring role as your friendly neighborhood drug dealer, with a lot of information he wasn't willing to share. Dad was the only character created in this offshoot. Emily and Alex gradually grew closer and further apart with each day, and Emily had some dark motivations and thicker back story which really made me more fond of her as the main character for this jam.

It's quite possible my next project may be to pursue my original idea, following Alex in her (not his) search for Theresa. I also think it'd be more interesting to dive into Alex and Emily's relationship as both female characters. Who doesn't love a conflicted, gay romance? I'd be thrilled to work with these voice actors again, although I feel they should be paid for their involvement next time around if it were to fill the scope I have in my head, potentially leading to a commercial release someday. Maybe I'll eventually get around to doing something like that. I don't know.

All in all, I'm incredibly pleased with the finished product after two weeks and I had a blast participating in this jam. It feels finished. It's doubtful that this will receive any major updates of any kind, maybe a quality-of-life update for some animations or bug fixes, maybe I'll try to implement a save system, but I can't see much outside of that. It's been a delight watching people play and I've received some wonderful insights, criticisms, and suggestions through the Adventure Jam community.

And hey if you made it this far, thanks! Feel free to let me know any suggestions or thoughts you might have on this or a potential re-imagining! Wouldn't it be cool to watch Emily and Alex go through more shit together over five days? To see five nights of nightmares? To see the Stranger cryptically share more off putting psychological and philosophical concepts? More corn?!?!

-hankworx