Jam Retrospective

Jam Retrospective!

It is finally over, guys! I had a blast and learned many new things. To many this may just seem like a regular prototype game but to me it means a lot, I've never done anything this scale all by myself, I've always had teams or relied on someone else for code or art. To me, being a game designer meant to be a team player above all else, so I've just did a couple of game jams on weekends alone, but neve a full-week game like this.

Oh and for those who don't know, I've done this prototype for the 7DFPS, a game jam about making a First Person game in a week, and PROCJAM, a game jam about making something procedural, both lasted for about 10 days.

I think I've achieved what I wanted with this, which was to make the best I could do in the time I had. With exception of the audio, the font, and those nice space backgrounds, everything was handmade by yours truly. There is a lot of stuff I would've done differently if I had to do it again, but I guess this means I've learned. There's is also tons of rooms for improvement, bugfixing and content creation as well yet to be done.

But now the prototype has audio, menu, a nice UI, some set dressing variation on the rooms, enemy variation too, and finally some narrative. I really enjoy story-rich games specially ones that mix frenetic action with moments of building strategy and preparing. I wanted to bring a little bit of that into this prototype.

I also love games that send a message to the world, that talk about something people usually don't talk. Through the small narrative in this prototype I tried to talk about the issues I've been noticing with how society is dealing with work conditions, labour laws and how the rapid technological growth we are having is outmatching our current legal system.

This is a issue specially in the game industry and also in my country, Brazil. I myself had to deal with this my whole life, since I graduated I've never ever worked in a full formal way, just through some sort of "freelance contracts" but with bosses and time schedules and everything that configures a full, formal work contract. That happened in literally every single company I've worked on, not only me but a lot of my friends that work with games, design, IT, and specially startups(don't even let me get started on startups...)

I think we are REALLY close to a cyberpunk dystopia already, without having to wait till 2077. It would be amazing if I can raise a little bit of awareness about this with this game, or just be another noise in the crowd of voices out there demanding work rights. But even if this game serves just to give a little bit of comical relief to the workers out there in similar situations, its's already a win for me.

This is why I want to continue with this project into a complete game and publish on steam. Not only to maybe raise a little awareness, but also for me to break free of the cycle of work conditions I've found myself into, if I can make a living out of my own games and be able to buy my cat's food with my passion for game design, it would be my greatest achievment in life.

With that said, I hope y'all enjoy playing this as much as I enjoyed making it.

Happy hunting everyone, and get ready to work overtime!