Post-mortem of Soledad

This is the post-mortem of Soledad, a game I made during the GMTK Game Jam, in the summer of 2020. The theme was Out of Control.

The weekend of the game jam I was supposed to be with my family, burying my grand-mother... But as fate had it, I couldn't make it into the plane and had to stay at home. I decided to make peace with it, spend the weekend making a game and dedicate it to her.

In her later years, she was afflicted with Alzheimer disease and I saw how devastating it can be. The idea of playing with memory loss and how Out of Control it can feel, came quite rapidly and I jumped right into it.

The name

The first thing I settled on, was the name. And I think it kept me focused during the jam. Soledad was my grandmother's name. But it also means solitude, in Spanish. This fact gave me the ending I needed. There are no happy endings with Alzheimer disease. The person afflicted ends up all alone in her head...

Initial idea

With the theme of the game decided, my initial thought was to split the game in two phases. In the first one, you would follow Soledad's life. Meeting the persons in her life and seeing her create the memories of them. In the second phase, you would accompany her, while she would lose control on her memories and see her loved ones fade away in her head.

At this point I already knew I wasn't going to be able to do any art to make it justice and  decided I was going to stick with a more minimalist approach.

I started writing the basis of what would become the class managing the relationships and went to bed.

At the end of the first 3 hours I had the theme, the concept and the art covered, at least conceptually. I only needed to figure out the gameplay.  

Basic Gameplay

My objective for Saturday was to finish gameplay, so I could spend Sunday polishing and playtesting. I needed then to implement the basic family tree navigation ASAP. I was going for a "clicker" game. This meant that I had to implement a lot of what would, essentially, be buttons. However, I didn't want to use UI elements, as I felt they would constrain me too much in how I implemented them. 

My solution was to have a small collider follow the mouse around. Whenever the cursor would collide with something, I would set a Highlighted boolean inside the element. Then, in my main class, I would track mouse clicks and trigger an event. Every element with Highlighted set to true, would trigger its own code handling the mouse click. Of course there could only be one element Highlighted at a time and so this solution fit my needs perfectly.

Once the mouse interaction was taken care of, I could implement the tree navigation, which remained untouched throughout the jam.

During the afternoon I kept thinking about the gameplay, but couldn't settle on how to do it exactly. Should it be time based? Skill based? How to implement the loss of memory? Should I add new memories if player played well? ...

Around 6 pm, I had the epiphany I was waiting for. Each game would be divided into rounds. The objective of each round was to find all names within a given time. If all names were found, the clock would decrease its time for next round. If not, some relationships would be lost, based on the number of names not found. The end of the game would be when Soledad had no more connections with any of her family members.

I went back to work, added the color implementation, based on the name of the person. Started work on the tutorial/story and the main menu.

By the end of the day, I had some bare bones of gameplay and was very confident I would make it to the finish line.

Finishing up

The last day was spent finishing up the implementation of the gameplay and playing catch up with some nasty bugs. (I had trouble with the GUI elements. Boy, was I glad not to have implemented the tree with UI buttons...).

I must say, the last few hours were hectic and, had I not had some help from my girlfriend, the game would have probably been shipped without music. Which would have been a shame, as I find it fits the theme really well.

I also didn't know how to upload a game to itch.io. And having only 15 minutes to learn how to do it isn't something I'd recommend trying.

Finally, and with less than 4 minutes till the end of the jam, I managed to upload the game.

Last thoughts

During the days after the end of the jam, I polished the game, adding animations and balancing gameplay.  This new version will be uploaded as soon as the jam rules allow it.

Now that I am finishing up the writing of this post-mortem, I feel like I have to give some advice to my future self. It would be quite hard to reduce the amount of what I have learned to a few sentences so instead I will cherry pick only two:

• Making a Trello/GitHub project was fundamental in keeping me focused on tasks and avoiding feature creeping.
• Do not let the music/sound choice until the end. It would have been better to start looking into it around the middle of the jam (in this case, Saturday evening).

Thanks for reading,

Luis