About Care(taking)
I recently participated in my first game jam, the emotionally loaded jam, and I wanted to write about the development process, and my general thoughts and feelings surrounding the game & its development.
THE PAST
I started game development in January 2023, so I've been working on numerous prototypes for the past 2 years or so. A lot of that time was spent learning programming, taking Harvard's excellent cs50 course. I may be misremembering, but I believe it was 8 or 9 weeks long when I took it. However, it took me maybe 16 weeks to finish all the exercises. I struggled A LOT with programming.
After this, I spent my time trying to replicate the style of the silver case in Godot, for a little adventure game I wanted to make. I spent maybe a year working on this prototype, and to be honest, it's still cool! Though, poorly programmed/thought out.
After getting bored, I spent another 6 months making the bones of an FPS. I learned a lot about 3D modelling, animation and texturing during this time. The idea was to make a true first-person shooter, psychological horror, as there are not many in the wild.
Both the room and shooter project have two things in common, they are very ambitious, and would likely take me (at my current skill level) at least 5 years to ship. I grew frustrated with the idea of not releasing something for so long, so thought my best bet would be joining a game jam. I went looking, and the emotionally loaded jam felt like the best fit for where I was at.
CARE(TAKING) - IN DEVELOPMENT
the spirit of this jam is to express an emotion through ANY game mechanic -- dialog, colors, sound design, whatever your heart tells you 🌼
From the emotionally loaded jam homepage
I picked this jam due to its lax themes and guidelines. I always want to make games that are emotionally expressive, so it didn't feel like it would hamper me whatsoever. The secondary theme for the jam was Graveyard, which I felt inspired me right away.
To begin, I just wanted to have a 3d scene that could, unmistakeably, resemble a graveyard.
Alright, well. It was a start. I made the little gravestone myself, just by creating a box and then rounding out the corners.
I wanted to add some atmosphere, and also give a sense of scale to the level itself, by adding looooooads of gravestones to a plane.
It's kind of cool, and to be honest, would've worked fine for the purposes of the game. The game also had a different name! But, I had another idea hit around this time.
I wanted to take that flat plane, but add bumps and grooves. So I used a displacement modifier in blender. 
The whole floor in the game is just this one bumpy plane, trying to simulate the uneven ground of a graveyard. I think it's marginally more interesting than just being on a flat plane, at least.
Oh shit, I forgot, I also added this amazing looking sky box. 
For which, I used a tool called Spacescape and Cubemap to panorama to format the image correctly for Godot.
Then there's these bad boys. 
I tried to make them mountainous at a distance, but, in game they looked more like trees, kind of, so I just made a forest surrounding the plane instead. These were made with the same displacement method, but amped up to a ridiculous degree.
I also made the fences, because I didn't want the player to be able to just jump off the edge, and I also scaled back the size of the graveyard significantly. The initial idea was to have thousands of graves, but I settled on the 869 there are currently, and fenced them in.
Speaking of which, another tool that helped me tremendously when creating the level itself (and, specifically, placing the fences/graves), was the plugin Asset Placer by CookieBadger. If you work in Godot and want to make levels, I highly recommend it. I don't even want to think about how long this scene would've taken to set up without it.
The dialogue system was created with massive help from this post on itch by World Eater Games. I've made numerous dialogue systems in the past, but, this approach really helped me in terms of building an extendable base to work from (including some features from my other systems!). Eternally grateful for this write-up, if you're interested in making a system like this, give it a read!
After creating the level, and placing everything, the real challenges really started to pile up. I even made a pause screen with fancy options (completely unnecessary, I don't think I've ever seen anyone look at them) to distract myself from doing real, tangible work. But, eventually, I had to settle in and become uncomfortable for the rest of the jam.
I don't want to talk about the systems, it's mostly self-explanatory. Choose a grave, spawn a ghost, despawn the ghost after the player makes a choice, blah blah blah. I want to talk about what I struggled most with, which was the writing aspect. Now, I'm not entirely sure why I chose to make a game that's all about dialogue, knowing I've never written a story before (I have written song lyrics before, but never something with characters speaking), but I think it turned out alright. It could have been way, way worse.
I wanted to speak to the anger I feel looking at the world. The inaction and lack of attentiveness. I wanted to make a game to vent about how disgusted I am with, not this planet, but those with all the power in our world. The rich and powerful who look down on the poor, and who don't bat an eye at the horrific injustices that occur. The genocide deniers, the corporate greed, the filth they perpetuate through society. I feel it doesn't translate exactly into the subject of the game, but that's where a lot of my thoughts for the setting and dialogue came from.
NOW
I'm not entirely sure how to feel about the game now. The whole time whilst making it, my confidence was pretty low, and I thought fuck, this sucks. I'm still not too high on it, but people around me have praised the game, so I'm happy someone is enjoying it at least. I never even considered that anyone would play it in the first place. Whenever I make art, I'm completely and totally willing for it to disappear amidst the other millions upon millions of pieces of art out there. Any play is wonderful, and I'm so happy for the response it had.
THE FUTURE
I want to join two more game jams this year. It was stressful, fun and exhilarating to make, and release something. I have released other types of art in the past, and there is nothing like it. It's an addictive feeling, and extremely meaningful in terms of putting a piece of yourself out there into the world. You should make something, today, tomorrow and the day after. Do not be afraid to create something that pops into your head at night, do not be afraid of your lack of abilities or worry about if you can pull it off or now. I promise, it's worth it, just give a shot and see what happens!
(There are probably lots of grammatical errors in this post, I apologise. It's more of a ramble than anything serious.) You can play Care(taking) here