Well! Another game has come and gone for a game jam! And with it,  we once again say ad astra per aspera!

This was another project that went very well throughout it's development! Which I'm super happy for! I'm sure as developers we all know that things can go wrong very quickly, especially with feature creep and scope creep.

What went right?

• Writing

My favorite part of the entire process is usually writing. There are so many things you can slip in for people to notice, and so many words you can use to make people feel a certain way. The goal for the writing on WBTW was to give the player a heavy sense of uncanny valley, and truly unsettle them. Things were mostly normal with you, except... when they weren't. You'll see it a lot in the way the main character remembers things from their past and remembers something unsettling, or pushes past things that normal people just wouldn't be able to do themselves, like kissing somebody with blood all over their face (especially when that blood isn't theirs). I head a friend who I would read excerpts to and they just got more and more excited about playing the game with each line. 

I didn't do too much of a writing outline. I find that unless I've already tried to write the entire script, that knowing where it will go just isn't possible for me to predict. Often times I like the writing to take me places, not the other way around. In total, there are 6 "chapters" to the script, and I didn't know where each one was going until I got to the end of the one before it, and that was honestly my favorite part. As I would finish a chapter, the idea for where the next one would go would come to me. I loved it.

Writing took a good week. This kind of project was a little bit outside the normal of what I'm used to working on, so when I got back from my camping trip on Sept 4, I got started. By Sept 10, the script was finished, proof read, and had it's final draft completed at 29K words!

• Art

Art seemed to be super easy this time around. I didn't mull about trying to think about how I wanted them to look, I just got into drawing the concepts, and then when I was able, I finalized them. The big guy Kelly is my favorite design wise. Slough is my favorite for their voice (which I voice). Vust comes in second last for being cute and Dad comes in dead last for being endearing, but corrupted, haha. Then of course there's Dog, who of course wins above all else for being a good boi.

Backgrounds were sourced from Unsplashed and simply put through Photoshop's filter gallery until I achieved an effect I liked. UI was fairly consistent, having a black/white theme that's kind of blurry and squiggly at times.

• Sound

Ambience was completed first with creative commons sounds, crows, creaking, general room tone, etc. Music was completed with FL Studio and is much more simpler than what I've created in the past. A lot of my songs for my games are usually 4 instruments or less (in most cases they're just 1 instrument, or at most 2), but I really needed to go for something that set a generally creepy undertone. FL Studio has a bunch of plugins that provided this and there's actually one "instrument" called "Nostromo" that is used in 2-3 tracks. I wanted something that was vaguely familiar sounding as well, something that would give you the feeling of knowing, but not knowing at the same time. 

My favorite thing about creating the music was that for the main track you hear throughout the game, there's a little secret... and because I'm bad at keeping secrets related to my own projects, I'll spill the beans. S.O.S is "beeped" in morse code in the background. And my favorite track is called "ditty", because I didn't have time to name the tracks properly, and it plays when you make dog's food, and when you're in the body chop shop (it also plays in the game trailer).

Last was voice acting! Which went swimmingly and I want to take a chance again to thank my voice actors PaullyAC and Josh Edwards (who's a fellow Itch dev!). I'm, as always, super appreciative of their time and effort and their help on this project. :) They delivered their lines perfectly, and I couldn't be happier!

• Programming

Programming for this was probably the easiest it has ever been. Maybe not as easy as All of my Tomorrows because of the size of the project, but still quite easy. There was no major programming required besides adjusting where certain events happened, something that was just a quick click and drag away. And the combination puzzle toward the end of the game simply used the scripts I created for the "rock puzzle" in All of my Tomorrows, just with some minor tweaks.

My favorite parts to program were the "Dog food minigame" where you can make a plate of food for Dog, simple but cute. As well as the "body chop shop" mini game, where you have to harvest the body you've collected for its various parts to appease the beings in your home.

What went wrong?

• Writing

Writing for this project took TOO long. I had taken days before I'd gotten the meat of the script done, and it took much more time than it should have, or usually did. While I do have writing/novel projects that I work on when I can, this kind of material I was not familiar with writing (my talents lay in sci-fi and fantasy, not murder, dismemberment and a character who's indifferent to most of it haha). The plot took turns that I didn't have time to wrap up together nicely, I didn't get to include the amount of lore I wanted to have in the time frame I was given (although editing the game after the judging period is allowed), and I had trouble with the writing perspective. With All of my Tomorrows and Rainbow Heartbeats, the perspective is often times second person (you do this, you do that). I've been working on Rainbow Heartbeats for so long that it seemed to be the only perspective I was able to remember to write instead of first/third person, which is more typical. When I first started writing the script, all I could manage was in second person, but I wanted it to be more relatable with first person. Going back to change all the "you, your, etc" was very painstaking, and I'm self conscious that there's still one or two kicking around in the game still that I missed because I'm so used to seeing it.

• Art

I didn't really have any trouble with the art - besides getting Kelly's belly giblets to work, but that's more of a programming issue. I guess my biggest gripe was how long it took me to find the images I liked for the backgrounds. Of course I needed pictures that would fit the theme of the game, I couldn't send the player back to a 15 year old abandoned house and having it look like an episode of the Kardashians or MTV Cribs, which is a lot of what I was finding on Unsplash. Updated, beautifully photographed houses that didn't fit at all.

I know I shouldn't complain when it was my choice to use creative commons images from the internet, but I guess I just expected there to be a little bit more than there was.

The rest of the art process was fairly quick, and I had no other troubles with it!

• Sound

Finding a good sound for your game can be hard. While it did only take me 1 day to come up with the several tracks that you can hear in the game (especially because 2-3 of them are just one note wonders that repeat with a spoopy effect added), I tried hard to make songs that were "different". I hope I achieved this.

Now... for the dreaded voice acting... this leads to a little story about me swearing off doing voices for the foreseeable future. I voice multiple characters, Vust, Slough, Mom, news anchor, the 3 ghosts, and the voice of the whispers at the very beginning. I used a filter to provide the voice for Vust and used my normal voice for the rest, but for Slough... well their voice is affectionately referred to as the "Pizza Man" voice (thanks to MissPilcrow, a good friend, for giving me that one). If you've ever heard Arin Hanson (Game Grumps, Egoraptor) do his bit where there's a robot ordering a cheese pizza, this was the inspiration for Slough. It MURDERED my voice. I recorded for 20-30 minute sessions for 3 days in a row because not only was doing this voice with the necessary tone/growl I was looking for extremely difficult, I'm also still battling what has turned into a 6 week cold/infection, and I'm still coughing like I have something to prove to the very second of writing this. It completely ruined me. My voice is now deeper (not what you want as someone of the female persuasion, or as someone who used to get made fun of for having a deep voice), and I have voice cracks with almost every single sentence, and can't maintain a higher pitch to save my life! 

No more voice acting for me for now. 😒

• Programming

As always programming seems to have more minor issues than major ones. I'd go in to fix something, and change something to test it, and would forget to change it back before making a build (making a list of what I touch might be necessary next time...). Scaling and option issues (volume still doesn't persist between the main menu and the main game and I'm annoyed about it to be honest), forgetting to change the "scale with screen size" setting BEFORE building my game, programming the body chop shop knife mouse was easy, but had me going out on a limb to hope my code worked when I needed it to be activated and deactivated, having the dialogue and menu options render OVER the pause menu, getting it working, then BREAKING IT AGAIN. Small things like the game getting hung up because I forgot to attach a button, or didn't set a duration for a fade out so the event never happens because it never fades... 😂 it's really a bunch of small, rookie mistakes, coupled with my panic to get the game in on time.

I was programming up until the last hour before submission, then submitted my project with 1 hour to spare... ONLY TO FIND OUT THE HOSTS OF THE JAM EXTENDED THE DEADLINE TO OCT 1?!?! Have they done this before? Was it an oversight? DID I MISS A COMMUNITY POST?! So I spent all of Oct 1 making small changes and got the game up to version 0.9.6 before calling it quits, haha.

Final thoughts!

I really love this project. It's got gore, it's got an unsettling atmosphere, it's got characters you can date, it's got dogs, it's got puzzles, it's got dad's with open chested, half skeleton sprite design with inspiration taken from the "fungal skeleton" from the movie "Annihilation"... it's got DOGS.

While it was hell the last 3 days to get it completed before submissions closed up, I'm happy to say that I got it done, despite some issues here or there, and it's my favorite project to date.

Please check out my other projects and consider supporting me with a donation, or by following any projects you think look interesting!

Lastly, thanks to the jam hosters for Spooktober VN Jam 2022, and good luck to all other collaborator's, studios, groups, soloists, and all other walks of life who also submitted their projects or entered the jam! I hope you all continue to seek and achieve what you're looking for in this indie world!

Please check out the video included in this entry for the video devlog for the creation of With Bodies They Walk! To follow is a game guide for getting the endings!