GBJam 12 Postmortem

GBJam 12 has concluded! Yay! 👏🎊🎉👏🥳 I had only previously been in one game jam back when I was in college, but I didn't work on anything for that jam and just played games my fellow college mates made. This was the first game jam where I actually worked on let alone finish and submit something. Thus, I was satisfied and happy with my performance.

What I did in the 10-day-long jam

Although the game jam lasted 10 days, I didn't actually start any development on the first 3 days because I was busy with other things. Thus, taking into account how I finished and submitted the game 1.5 days before the deadline, there were only 5.5 days where I worked on the game-- within which I spent around 60 hours in game development.

The first thing I had to decide was what game engine to use. I spent 1 day making this decision. Prior to this jam, I had only fully developed 2 games (see ESCape from Kemper and GBaes Isekai) using Unity and RPG Maker 2003. Given the GameBoy constraints for this jam, using RPG Maker 2003 was out of the question, and given the great betrayal of Unity that happened some time ago, Unity was also out of the question for me. With Godot being all the rage right now in indie game development, I was thinking about using Godot so I followed Brackeys' Godot Beginner Tutorial and made a tiny sample game to get a sense of what working in the game engine would be like. Working in Godot felt familiar because of my experiences of working in Unity back in college, but I had a rough time tuning player movement to feel GameBoy-esque. For me, the biggest thing that makes a game have a GameBoy soul was movement. I wanted to make it such that if the player pressed a movement button, the player character would move a set distance. If the button was held for some time, the player character would only move in increments of that specific distance. If you've played old GameBoy Pokemon games I think you would get a sense of what I'm talking about-- if you tap the d-pad your character moves 1 square and if you hold the d-pad your character keeps moving, but you can let go of the d-pad while your character is traversing through that square, and the character will finish traversing that square. Thus I had decided to use GB Studio, which I had stumbled upon when researching what game engines fellow jam-mates were using. The movement in GB Studio was already preprogrammed to work how I wanted it to, and being that it's an engine for developing GameBoy games, it would make my game evoke that GameBoy soul all the more easier. And also game development in GB Studio felt very similar to RPG Maker 2003 with its use of scenes and etc., so developing in GB Studio felt very familiar.

Then, I planned on paper (or Google Docs rather) what the story and gameplay would be like. I'll talk about how I decided these in the next section, but the rest of the 4 days was spent developing the game. I first made a very rough sample area I could use to test out game mechanics, and then I made the Babysitter (player), Baby (core game mechanic), some chores (game objective), and Mommy (antagonist) and dumped them all on the sample level to have something playable asap. It's important to have something remotely playable so that you don't feel burnt out from constant developing with nothing to play with. Once I was satisfied with the above, I drew what I wanted the map to look like on a piece of paper and then got to work, fully completing each room of the house (i.e. scene in GB Studio) one-by-one.

From a low-level perspective, when developing a piece of the game, I started with the graphics. I used Aseprite for all the pixel art. After graphics were done, I imported them into GB Studio and worked on scripting whatever that piece of the game was. Ultimately, my development was just a big cycle of pixel art drawing and GB Studio scripting.

I spent the last day on on the soundtrack and sfx. Music composition is the thing I am least familiar with. First I decided what program to use to create sfx. Many fellow devs recommended jsfxr, but the sfx I made with that tool did not import and sound properly in GB Studio, so I ended up recording things in Audacity and modifying them work properly in GB Studio (thanks to this tutorial by Yogi (Tronimal)). After a few sfx were done, I watched Brackeys' How to make Music for your Game video and tried emulating his music composition process to make some simple tunes in GB Studio's built-in music editor.

Once all of the above was done, I published the game and showed it to my friends for some final playtesting and bugfixing. My sincerest thanks to them for all of the enthusiasm they showed when I shadow-dropped Mommy Eat My Baby 😊 They helped me catch a bunch of bugs that would have been embarrassing if people complained about them in the game jam submission page 😅

What I could improve on next time

The playtesting my friends did for me towards the end of the jam was very helpful, and I think it would be safer to get more playtesting done consistently throughout the development period rather than just the very end. I was lucky because my friends weren't busy and were enthusiastic to play, but if that had not been the case, I would not have been able to notice and fix certain bugs. It wasn't that I didn't playtest my game-- I playtested a lot as I developed-- but I myself fell into certain gameplay patterns so I missed some bugged interactions here and there.

Why "Mommy Eat My Baby"?

A running inside joke I have with my brother is the phrase "Mommy eat my baby". It all started when we watched Hereditary. I had previously thought Hereditary was the movie where there was a scene of a mother yelling at her son, "Why can't you be normal?!" but it turns out that scene is in Babadook, not Hereditary. Nonetheless, my brother and I always quote that scene. One day during dinner I turned to him and said, "Hey what if there was a scary movie where the mom turned to the baby and yelled, 'Why can't you be normal?' and then ate the baby". From then on, variations of that became a running joke between us. And now I've turned it into a game.

Regarding the Results of the Game Jam

Now let me talk about the results of the voting period from the game jam. First to quote Polyducks:

"Entries are ranked by their different categories as well as an 'overall' score. Remember:

• none of these ratings matter
• there were some real high tier games that got passed over for ratings for whatever reason
• voting is an inherently unfair and opinionated process and cannot be fixed with any particular system
• your personal value is not tied to what other people rated your game
• the scores are skewed by the number of ratings they received"

That being said, by the end of the voting period, Mommy Eat My Baby got 46 ratings, the 11th highest out of all 390+ entries. That means at least 46 people (+ a bunch more from friends, family, and strangers coming from itch.io searches) played the game! That in and of itself is already a success for me, because my personal motivation for game development is to create something that can entertain a bunch of people for some time. If I've briefly caught the attention of a bus full of people and entertained them for that short time, I'm happy. Most if not all the reception around the game was positive. I read and responded to all of the comments, some of which really made my day.

I think a big reason for why I got that many ratings was because I myself played, rated, and left a comment on a bunch of fellow jam games: I played, rated, and commented on 68 games in total during the voting period of the game jam.

A trend I've noticed is that if you leave a comment on someone's game, they'll play yours and leave a comment on yours too. So the more games you play, rate, and leave comments on, the more people will play yours.

Now for the actual results, you can see them in the game submission page for the jam.  Out of 390, Mommy Eat My Baby got 21st in Spookiness, 27th in Gameboy Soul, 67th in Gameplay, 139th in Graphics, 154th in Soundtrack/SFX, and 59th place overall.

With this game being my first game jam entry ever, I am very happy that I managed to be top 50% in all categories, let alone be 59th place out of 390. The two things I put the most effort in were the horror aspect of the game (the jam's Spooky theme) and the GameBoy soul. To be ranked so highly in those two categories makes me proud. I will celebrate by eating some cake 😋 And also, it makes sense that the graphics and soundtrack/sfx ranked so lowly compared to the other criteria. I was learning pixel art from scratch during the jam, and the soundtrack for Mommy Eat My Baby was the first ever soundtrack I composed. I still have a lot of learning and practice to do.

The Future of Mommy Eat My Baby

As for what's next, I'm going to follow through on what most game jammers don't do and that is polish the game and nicely package and release it. Some people left good feedback comments on the game-- I'll take those into account and fix up some annoying things in the game and then publish an update for Mommy Eat My Baby. Some people have requested GB Rom download files for the game, so I'll upload that too.

Anyways, if you've made it this far, thank you for reading through my rambles, and an even bigger thank you if you've played and enjoyed Mommy Eat My Baby!