Another Jam Down

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Narrative Jam Thoughts

It's not perfect, but it was close enough to something finished that I felt comfortable submitting it. Here's Otter out of Water. Warning, it's only a bunch of text and a few hurried drawings.

The intended effect of forcing me to learn new things has worked on the last two jams. If this were a video game, I'd be learning a new ability at the cost of HP. It's definitely stressful even when there are no consequences. I don't want to sign up for a jam just to give up when it gets difficult. Maybe more specifically, in two jams I've done I managed to push through to present something that is similar to a finished project, but boy did I want to give up many times throughout.

Maybe a necessary byproduct of learning something new is the eventual frustration that you will encounter. Throughout both of these projects I've encountered difficult technical challenges that made me feel stupid. Oddly enough, perseverance and taking breaks helps to push through these obstacles. I really should have walked away after no progress the first weekend, but I felt like I had to make progress. I only really had one weekend to work on the PIG Squad jam since I was out of town for most of the second. That first weekend crushed me. I didn't think I was ever going to figure out how to get Ink files to work in the way I wanted in Unity. Returning to the problem after a break helped to chip away at the problem until I figured it out. I think I also underestimated the type of project. Turns out, if you don't know how to do something, it's still difficult even if it appears like a simple project on the outside.

I'm pretty sure I've thought about it before, but during the jam I kept thinking about how game projects are A LOT of little problems that you have to tie together. When you look at each little problem, they're manageable, googleable, and something that you can explain if you had to ask for help. Maybe you have to educate yourself a bit before you know how to ask the question. Lesson learned this jam: don't try to solve a bunch of problems at once, break them down.

Like BBBB from the first jam, I want to improve on things. This jam wasn't rated, so I could return to the project immediately add improvements, but I'm enjoying a break. Not sure if no one likes my project or if this narrative bunch is just quiet, but I haven't gotten any comments on it. Thankfully that also means no one being negative, which is kinda nice. Although, some feedback could be useful.

Currently Playing

I want to keep pushing through Final Fantasy 16 to just mainline the story because it looks amazing. The sidequests are too wordy and not terribly interesting. If you want to have a perspective presented to you that you may not have considered, this is a great talk that I think identifies a problem that a lot of AAA games suffer from - GDC "The Freedom Fallacy". Unfortuantely, I don't remember where the idea of "volition" is discussed, but the whole thing is worth watching. To summarize (poorly): volition is doing what you want to do. To provide an opposite example that I experienced, which can easily be compared to a plethora of open world games, in the PS4 Spider Man game, I may have finished most of the game and I found myself running around the city collecting backpacks. It got to a point where I asked myself "wtf am I doing collecting all these packpacks?" I think it's lazy design to fill a world with meaningless things to do. This is the case for FF16's side quests. They are wordy, boring, and contribute very little. I'd like to know if I'm wrong about all them, but at this point, I see no sense in pursuing any of them. It's a bit of a shame.

Tears of the Kingdom has basically been put on hold until I wrap up some other games.

When it's too bright in our basement to play FF16, because the night scenes are basically pitch black, I've been playing the Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut. Looks great, and the combat is fun. This suffers from a volition problem as well. I basically only want to finish the game and I'll hit the little points of interest on the map if it's convenient. The scenary is amazing and I like to stop and appreciate it.

I wasn't terribly impressed with Diablo 4, but it's proving to be a fine multiplayer game. I was completely uninterested in the story. There weren't really any characters the gripped me so I was content to push through it with some assistance to try to join the new season. Turns out, I like melee characters more than casters here. I was so tired of casting the same spells through level 50. I don't really care for looter games like this, although again, it's a fine way to pass some time.

It didn't help D4's case that I started Baldurs Gate 3 just before the D4 release. Now there's a game with some rich story and interesting characters. It also seemed to fit a place that only one game can occupy at a time in my mind for an isometric game. I don't know why, but I'm irritated that D4 is stuck in the same perspective for their fourth iteration. Something about it seems to trivialize your opponents. Nice thing about BG3, you can mess with the camera while you contemplate you turn. I'm also appreciating turn based games a lot more as I get older. Looking for to the official release this coming Thursday. I heard some rumblings that progress wouldn't transfer, but I had just started over, so not a big deal.

In my attempt to finish games I wishlisted during 2022, I managed to get some credits today in Citizen Sleeper. I picked it up as I began to appreciate narrative games during the jam. It helped to see what a narrative game could be like. They seemed to have adopted some popular mechanics from pen and paper games where you get a collection of dice and depending on the number, it can make an action more likely to succeed, with 6 at 100%. Sometimes this RNG could be frustrating, but the whole game felt well balanced with some risk looming over your head throughout most of it. I managed to create a really interesting story that felt like a single player campaign in a popular pen and paper game. If I played it again, I could focus on some other parts of this sci fi space station, but I pursued the story that I thought was most interesting. The story touched on some really interesting concepts and gives you the freedom to fill in the blanks in your own imagination between exchanges with NPCs. Although I had time to just power through it, this is the relaxing type of game that I like to play in small bursts like on lunch breaks, or before bed.

Going back through my "last played" on Steam, I've got a lot that I've started that I want to finish. Roadwarden and Disco Elysium are two that play pretty well on the steam deck that I might lean on to help inspire me to keep working on Otter out of Water.