Hi! Panlord here. I'm going to ramble about how my HoloJam 6 and the development of GiMurin Gacha Grems went. Whether or not you read this, I hope you have a nice day nonetheless!

Table of Contents

1. My Goals for HoloJam 6
2. Breakdown of what I did for the 2 weeks
3. Original Plans for GiMurin Gacha Grems
4. Developer Insights on GiMurin Gacha Grems

My Goal for HoloJam 6

I've known about Hololive and vtubers in general for a long time (I watched Kizuna Ai many years ago) and I would put on a Fauna stream every now and then, but I never really participated in the space and fandom until around August-September 2024, when I started routinely tuning into Ame, Gigi, Ceci, and Fauna's streams. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that there were Hololive fan game jams; I found out when I came across that one Hololive Papers Please fangame on my twitter feed. After learning of HoloJam, I resolved to keep an ear out for when the next jam was going to happen so I could participate. My goal was small and simple: make a simple game to honor one of my idols and their supportive community-- in this case, Gigi Murin and the grems in the shoebox because I think Gigi and grems' lore and dynamics with the larger Hololive community have a lot of creative potential.

2-week Breakdown

This would be the fourth game jam I've participated in, so I've already experienced and learned what not to do when working in game jams. But did that stop my experience from going off the rails? Nope, because I willingly dug myself a hole and jumped into it. 😏

In my previous game jams, I suffered from being stunlocked in the planning phase. I would come up with so many ideas and flip flop between them that I would end up wasting a majority of the jam time. This jam, I was resolved in making the first idea that came to my mind-- a top-down roguelike action game similar to Hades and Enter the Gungeon. I was wary of scope creep and the limited time available, so I made sure to keep the scope small! That being said, as a relatively new user of Godot (I had only used it to develop one game for a game jam prior to this), I had my fair share of struggles. It took me several days to get a player controller working in a way I had liked (I made a lot of different implementations, for both 2D and 3D). It took me another two days experimenting with whether or not I wanted to go the 2D or 3D route. For 2D, I spent a day making rough placeholder character sprites and implementing player movement. By the end of the day, I thought about it and although there would only be several different entities, I did not want to repeat all of the sprite creation work so I tried 3D stuff the next day. It only took 1 day of struggling to import models and mixamo animations to decide that 3D was not my way to go for this jam 😅. 

After a weekend of no work (I spent Memorial Day weekend hanging out with friends and family), there was 4 days left in the jam and I had only implemented player movement. At this point, I crashed out and thought about whether or not I should just set everything aside and start anew-- something I did occasionally back in college. Was it a bad idea to start something from scratch and come out with a finished little thing in 4 days? Probably, but like Gojo Satoru I said, "Nah, I'd win." I shelved the roguelike idea for further development after the jam, and from May 27th to May 30th, I worked on and ended up with GiMurin Gacha Grems (thank you to Juanba on the HoloJam discord server for the name; originally it was just "GiMurin Gacha Game"). It went like this:

• May 27th: Designing the game and Planning the story beats
• May 28th: Implementing the gacha game mechanic + creating all the assets for the gacha items and units
• May 29th: Refactoring code and connecting the gacha game mechanic to an overall story + writing the story
• May 30th: Last minute integration of the story into the game and desperate playtesting and bug fixing... and then submission

SPOILER WARNING FOR BELOW!!!

Now I'm going to talk about the original plans for GiMurin Gacha Grems (i.e. what was cut because of scope creep and etc.) and then some insight to some things about the game. Spoilers below, so if you haven't played it, I would encourage you to do so because it is pretty short (maybe you can complete it in like, 10 minutes?)!

Original Plans for GiMurin Gacha Grems

Originally, the story was going to be more drawn out. The main character, Grem Greg, was going to be a lonely outcast grem who would find a tablet with which he would accidentally summon Gigi through an initial free 10 pull. As Greg tries to support Gigi's attempts to escape the shoebox, they would meet Nancy, and as Gigi's antics continue, Greg and Nancy's relationship would grow closer. 

Once Gigi notices the hole in the side of the shoebox (it's the shoebox's handle), the gang would try to get her up there. In order to do so, they would use the item gacha to pull an axe so they could chop down a tree and use the wood. Before they could use the wood though, the Ceci rate-up banner would be unlocked and the grems would pull on the Ceci banner, summoning Cecilia Immergreen and inadvertently Cecilia Immerred as well. Gigi and Ceci have their usual Autofister moments, but then Immerred would jump out and kidnap Gigi. Then the trio of Greg, Nancy, and Cecilia Immergreen would have to go through the forest to rescue Gigi from Immerred.

This is where a big part of the game was cut due to scope creep. Originally, I was going to have a turn-based combat system similar to Epic Seven where each character had three moves or passives they could use. Enemies would be the Gigi variants (e.g. Gigi Snake, Gigiraffe, etc.) that Greg pulled in the very beginning of the game when he summoned Gigi herself. Although the player started with Greg, Nancy, and Ceci, they could do more pulls to unlock more units (Grem-chan was going to be hella OP). But to do more pulls, the player would need more money; to get more money, they would either do a small mundane minigame similar to the squat minigame we have right now for a small amount of money, OR they could do some gambling with like blackjack or rock-paper-scissors. That was where the Foresight Glasses in the item banner would come in-- if you had pulled the Foresight Glasses from the item banner, you could cheat with the gambling minigame to make tons of easy money. Then pull on the unit gachas to make combat easier. By now you can see why I cut all this-- big scope creep for a 4-day project 😆. Maybe if I went with this idea at the start of the 2 weeks, I could have everything implemented in.

Anyways, back to the story, the gang would rescue Gigi from Immerred and everybody would make peace with each other. Then to finally escape the shoebox, a grem would pull out this tweet from Ceci, they would summon an otomo, and wind it up until it spins and starts flying. Then Gigi, Ceci, and Immerred would fly out of the hole with the otomo. The story would end with Greg reflecting on his journey and his melancholy at the loneliness he would have to return to, to which Nancy would go, "But now you have me :)" and then they kiss and Greg gets pregnant.

Developer Insights

Here I'll list some fun things throughout the game.

• I decided on the names for our two protagonists Greg and Nancy, as well as the ending with the grems kissing very early on. Because when they kiss, Greg + Nancy = Gregnancy --> Pregnancy (Greg would become pregnant from this kiss)
• Instead of making Greg an outcast (because I think the grem community overall is supportive and welcoming), I made Greg bullied by this one evil grem named Richard. He's named Richard because he's a Dick, and the name "Dick" is short for Richard.
• The notes on Ceci's textbox are the beginning notes to her opening theme song.
• When the theme for HoloJam 6 was announced to be "Love and Angst", I couldn't stop thinking of the movie "Thor: Love and Thunder" because 'Love and Angst' sounded to me a lot like 'Love and Thunder' (for the record, I disliked that Thor movie). Thus, I made the logo splashes for each arc reflect the logos for each Thor movie.
  

Anyways, that's all I have to ramble! Have a great day!