My Friends and I Made Another Game in 72 Hours

I've competed in many game jams over the years with this group of friends:

...and now Vibe Check , for Ludum Dare 59! This time I was a gameplay programmer and level designer.

This group has a long history of game development. I think most of us did jams prior to meeting each other. Personally, this is not a comprehensive list of projects—I'm missing a few Ludum Dares from before university—and each of us have tried our hands at developing several larger-scale concepts while between events.

The most entertaining part of a competition like this is that you get to spend time with your friends. The second most entertaining part is seeing how far you can take an absolutely absurd interpretation of the theme in only three days. The third most entertaining part is actually working on a video game, which is loads of fun if you do it right.

Usually what this means for us is that we sit down at 5:00 p.m. PST and either we like the theme or we hate it. The game either lives or dies in that room. A project might be able to survive a bad theme, but it can't survive the insipid feeling of a bunch of uninspired artists who don't want to work on the thing. I think if you sat down and played our entire gameography, you'd be able to tell which ones we liked working on and which ones we were bored of. We really liked this one.

Ludum Dare themes are selected over the course of a week in a series of elimination rounds decided by popular vote. This time the theme was signal. While many of our recent projects are gameplay-centric, you can spot embryonic elements of our visual style all the way back in our work on Damaged Control, which is essentially a walking simulator. To this day, we regularly talk about developing a spiritual successor of some kind to that game, which is fascinating to me given that we didn't even complete it0. Later, we all adored Signalis 0, both for its profound meditation on the nature of grief, and for how it absolutely oozes with a style that reminds us of our earlier work. Of course, they spent seven years on that game, and we made Damaged Control in 72 hours, but the similarities are there!

While most of Signalis takes place in an isometric view with fixed camera angles, there are flashbacks to several first-person "snow-globe" style vignettes. They remind me of @kittyhorrorshow.bsky.social 's work. My favorite of these, Rotfront Interplanetar Station 06, pictured above, inspired my pitch for Ludum Dare 59.

So I pushed for us to do some sort of atmospheric vignette to close the loop we opened half a decade ago with Damaged Control. The idea was that we'd make another walking/holding-E-simulator, aligning radar dishes or whatever in the middle of some awful inclement weather, and it would all be super moody and really arthouse-theater, like not at all fun to play on a kinetic level, but chock-full of capital-e Emotion.

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But that would be really hard

When you're making a video game, it's important to find where the delight is for the player. If you're lucky, and working in a genre with oodles of prior art to steal ideas from, and you're having fun developing it, the gameplay will eventually work itself out through the iteration process.

"Making games is no game. So many aspiring designers think that all you do is come up with a great idea and the sit around and play. That may be true if you are aping something that exists, like making just another first person shooter (this time in ancient Sumeria and with Demon Aliens!), or making something small and easy to iterate, but it is certainly NOT true when you are trying something new in the AAA space...

...and to make matters worse, the LAST person who can attest to a good game design is the game designer. Not only do they know what to do when they test it, but they are also predisposed to like it.

Oh no, the proper test is to hand it to a complete noob, in Crash’s case the ever rotating list of secretaries and clerical staff that worked at Universal. For many of them it was their first time touching a controller, and they succeeded immediately in failing, miserably, to get a single challenge passed. As they smiled and tried to be positive they were saying “this sucks” with their hands...

Only when the noobs start completing challenges and smile WHILE PLAYING do you know you are getting somewhere."

- Jason Rubin | Making Crash Bandicoot, Part 4

However, if the mechanics aren't inherently entertaining enough to sustain the whole experience, you have to find a different source for the player's delight. In a game like Damaged Control— an experience with almost zero mechanics beyond basic movement— the delight comes from pure audiovisual aura and eerie uncertainty. In my opinion, Damaged Control is fundamentally a horror game. The thing is, what we call a Horror game always risks devolving, at any moment, into a mere Terror game. In order to sustain a true Horror Experience for however many hours you're expecting the player to put in, the game needs to strike a fine balance between aura farming and thrilling the player.

Horror settings are often basically fantasy settings, because they are usually predicated on fantastical or exaggerated elements like ghost hauntings , corporate murder-prone cannibal cult insane asylums , or aliens from outer space . The artifice of the world sustains and nourishes the player's suspension of disbelief, which is crucial to manufacturing a horrifying experience grounded in some sort of supermundane threat0. My hypothesis is that maintaining that artifice seems to require a maximalist approach from the artist; a sort of sustained intervention which suffuses the entire work with the artist's worldview and intention0.

No art is a perfect simulacrum of its subject, because no medium is equivalent to real life. If you could somehow capture your subject in absolutely perfect detail, you would still have to make decisions about composition and presentation which would influence the result. For an illustrator, a still-life drawing of what might initially seem a relentlessly boring subject, like an apple, flowers into a billion little decisions that betray one's understanding of light, form, negative space, and the other principles of illustration. Even from the instant you select a subject at all, you unavoidably influence the result, both through your technical understanding and your worldview.

This is a photo of my copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain . The three illustrations are by different artists taking the class. If you look closely, I think you can begin to understand a little bit of the worldview of each of the illustrators by examining what elements they decided to include or exaggerate, and which they elected to leave out0.

Viewing the act of observing a subject as inherently interpretative, rather than viewing observation and interpretation as separate, has really positively influenced the way I relate to being alive. Through studying the way my worldview influences the way I look at a subject, and how that interpretation changes the way that I depict it in my artwork, I can learn both about myself and about the subject. I find horror delightful because the sustained aesthetic intervention it seems to require in order to make a good game leads to experiences totally infused with the humanity of the development team. Even if the subject matter is gruesome or upsetting, I don't think the core of horror is ugly. I think the core of horror is beauty— especially the beauty of connecting deeply with the vulnerable intention of the horror artist.

The Cleric Beast, from Bloodborne . While on the surface the Beast is a pretty rote example of a Fantasy Deer archetype, it's also emblematic of the gothic beauty of the entire game. Comparing it to the very similar Ancestor Beast from Elden Ring, I hope it isn't hard to see that the horror of the game is intimately tied to the splendor of the character and environment designs.

However, this also means that true Horror is horrendously labor-intensive to make. One of the nice things about a 72 hour game jam is that you don't really have time to make a game that devolves from Horror to mere Terror. Doing a game that is scary and thrilling requires a lot of iteration cycles that you just don't have time for in the context of a Ludum Dare. You're forced to pare down what you make to the bare essentials. Unfortunately, the bare essentials of a more-subdued Horror experience is still a lot to get done in three days, and if you get it wrong you don't have fun game mechanics to fall back on.

I remember living in my parents' basement while we developed Damaged Control. After we pushed the final commit to GitHub, I stood up from my desk and staggered, dazed and nonplussed, to plop face-down onto the mattress I was sleeping on. I faded in and out of napping while listening to my pals as they finished up submitting the thing. And it wasn't even complete. Exhausting!

To do a spiritual successor to Damaged Control justice in 72 hours would be quite challenging. We've developed our skills a lot in the last five years, though. I would have been interested in giving it a try. In the end we shot down the idea pretty quickly. One day, perhaps, we'll find time to sink our teeth into a longer event!

My beloved. One day we will return to you.

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The Era of Kafka

Instead, we made another game-mechanics-dominated title in Vibe Check. The concept is that you are running around a brutalist concrete skyscraper, way high above the cloud line, scanning crowds of people with your phone for Bad Vibes. If you find somebody with Bad Vibes and scan them, they instantaneously sink into the ground with a scream of agony.

However, if anybody spots you scanning them, they slap the phone out of your hand, potentially sending either you or your precious device or both careening right off the rooftop and into a game over screen. The movement is extremely Quake or Unreal Tournament , which is a funny choice for a game where you are mostly following slow moving NPCs around a map absolutely littered with death traps. Overall, I think everyone was very pleased with the gameplay, which reads somewhere between, like, the part in Metal Gear right before you incapacitate a guy after observing his patrol path for 20 minutes, and the part of Smash Bros where your friend who is really much better at fighting games than you edge guards your ass until you swear off sparring with her ever again.

So, not precisely a Horror experience. It certainly exudes a different energy than the relentlessly dour vibes of our earlier games. However, I think the game is actually a continuation of a style that has been developing in our 3D work for a few years. I'm proud of the way that you can see us grow as artists and engineers as you go along in our gameography.

On the one hand, we aren't afraid of changing the core components of our visual language to suit the game concept. For example, while Damaged Control relied on moody lighting and simple models, our games since then have featured visuals ranging from from pixel art to photobashing and relatively complex animation work.

Look at this screenshot from Please, Clap. You can barely see anything!

On the other hand, more recently, a foundation seems to be forming in our visual language. You can really clearly see it in Chthonic Cacophony, and it continues here:

A heavy reliance on photobashing and PBR textures, despite extremely simple model geometry

Vaporwave or even psychedelic color choice

Some kind of screen-space effects shader, which normalizes any discordant visuals and gives things a cohesive lo-fi feel

Attention given to shot composition and lighting, in order to use the simple elements that are present to their greatest potential

Special focus on punchy sounds to pump up the player's interactions with the world

Campy and hilarious animation on NPCs and player characters

Absurdist, fridge-horror world setting with environmental storytelling

High-energy and catchy music, focusing on a few loops and relatively sparse composition In order to drive an earworm so deep into your skull that you will never again be free

I think two elements have driven the genesis of this visual style. First, our game concepts are usually weird, with our most "normal" games (Staring Contest, Vibe Check) being fairly transformative reinterpretations of an existing genre, and our least "normal" (Please, Clap and Auctioneer) being completely inscrutable or downright broken-feeling. This absurdity tends to carry over in a sort of freewheeling way to the visual design, where almost anything feels like it could fit, because the artifice of the experience is so strange that there's very little left to ground the design in reality.

The second element is more practical— when we're working in 3D, photobashing and relying on shaders and animations is a little easier for our group, which has more programming experience than we do technical art experience. This is becoming less of a limitation over the years as we develop our illustration and modeling chops, but for the time being it's still more difficult for us to pull off a nice looking 3D model than it is to put together a good looking composition out of less labor-intensive elements.

This is all especially funny to me because it isn't the sort of visual style I enjoy personally. I like clean lines, gorgeous lighting with sharp shadows and silhouette work, harmonious color palettes, and a focus on lovingly-animated characters and interesting shot composition, like something that evokes editorial design rather than this insane antique shop chic we have going on at the moment. For me, this speaks to the degree to which working with other people will reveal elements of your art, and therefore elements of yourself, that you never would have discovered alone.

Staring Contest was still pretty grimy grimdark, but you can start to see the incongruous and kafkaesque visual design poking its head out.

The world is a mirror. When something crosses the abyss of ignorance to enter your comparatively limited field of vision, how you react to it can teach you about what it means to be alive. If you live an isolated life where all you're staring at all the time is the inside of your own head, you become someone with a limited worldview where nothing ever surprises or challenges you. This will feel comfortable for a time, but ultimately it's a recipe for living a parochial life where you spend most of your time bewildered and afraid. Other people are a fascinating source of ways of looking at the world you never would've thought up yourself.

I'm grateful to be surrounded with such an excellent group of people who can challenge me to do things that I never would have considered without their presence in my life. For me, that is what makes these game jams fun year after year!

I wonder if we can make the next game even more pink.