WE KEPT OUR PROMISE!

…and by that, I mean my promise to never work in a game jam solo again. Hi, this is Katherine speaking! I’m still so surprised (but mostly honored) to have achieved first place again for my second ever game jam, and this time it’s with my actual IRL friend from university! It was so great seeing old faces and meeting new ones this jam cycle, and now my BlueSky has grown a few more follows richer. Promise me you’ll live…in my DMs! It’ll be a promise we both keep! No, really, let’s chat outside of the game dev sphere <3

Hello, hello it’s Lemon / Lea / aforementioned IRL friend from university talking and I just wanted to say how amazingly stacked this jam was with entries. I mean, 36 hours is NOT a lot of time, and yet I was blown away by the vast amounts of blood, sweat, and tears so many of you guys poured into this!

I think, honestly, there were so many times where I wanted to give up…actually Lea and I were at a sleepover the whole time, and I kept thinking about getting up, walking out, and not sacrificing all my sleep for the sake of a 36 hour game when I had a quiz on Monday and classwork looming overhead… But as so many people have pointed out, we love art. We love writing. We love making games, so I think it’s beautiful to take the time to pour in everything you have into every part of your game—we’re actually not musically inclined at ALL, so the music rating not being dead last was an honor. We’ll keep getting better as we go!

Talk about a crazy ending to a jam… I mean, look at all those ties! Just goes to show that everyone was bringing their absolute A game to the party. I’m talking AP Lit level writing, Renaissance composition art, and of course music and sound design that will please the muses for generations to come. We really could not have gone up against a more fearsome set of participants. You guys had me sweating during those final announcements!

WE ARE BESTIES! (bakuman of the dev world if anyone knows that reference)

Okay but let’s get serious. Over 11k words in UNDER 36 hours? How does she do it? With different endings and a constantly evolving narrative, Katherine was burning a hole in my desk all while she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders—a thick pile of uni and club work. How does she write like she’s running out of time, like we need it to survive (because we definitely did need it, this game would be nothing without its writing)? I don’t think I’ll ever have a proper answer for you guys unfortunately, because like a unicorn, an untamed wild beast who may only exist in our wildest fantasies, Katherine operates on an entirely different plane than any of us mere mortals. She’s the one person I can come crawling five times over to with just the words “shitty hot blond guy” seared across my forehead, and expect absolute Mark Twain prize level art from in return. Can you guys believe I managed to bag THE Velox Turbo 2 winner onto the same team as me? Because I can’t. And believe me that when I read the script, my smile was anything but fake and my heart was burning if not anything else… 

And we just have to talk about the art. The UI. Also the programming in general. In our last jam, I complained the whole time that I actually had to program. I’ve got my roots in fanfic writing, where all you need is a dream, Arial pt 11, and a Google doc. We can talk all day about Lea’s beautifully animated sprites and we rightfully should, but we don’t talk enough about the weight on the programmer’s back to have to be responsible for not only getting the animations in, getting the custom UI in, and making sure everything is functional—all while writers like me are lalala-ing in the corner of the room doing what we like to do most. Lea’s an amazing artist to be sure, but she’s also someone who I can consistently rely on. And let me tell you, when you do as many group projects as I do in uni, reliability is the only quality you can’t train. Anything I could say about her artwork has already been said time and time again by everyone else who recognizes real for real, but what I really want everyone to know is all the things besides art she had to take on for my sake. There is no Saiyohara without LemonInk… There is no LemonInk without Saiyohara.

WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THIS GAME.

God, making this game though…36 hours is doable, I’ll give you that, but I really do mean it when I say I’m not in the perfect place to make games. I’ve got four classes on the quarter system, three clubs on my ass, my lab and my personal projects and the poster presentations for those on my ass, and I’m doing all of this because I want a Clinical Psych PhD and the only way to do that is to pledge your free time to academia. Real life is hard! I’m sure Lea can relate…

Oh boy, tell me about it… Let’s just say that even when gaming is on the forefront of my mind, final classes, teams in need of leading, and performance schedules don’t seem to find much sympathy for weary folks like us. It’s now become a daily norm for me to have 4-5 projects stacked up on my plate so reserving 36 hours for a singular game was a toughie! I’ve got animations to do, illustrations to make, assets to implement, code to smooth, writing to produce, and edits to make. Not to mention the fact that I’m right in the throes of getting my first degree (Psych and Anthro and proud of it!!). Geez Louise!

Yeah! Are we at the moping part yet? Let’s mope. It’s a point of pride for me to be able to write a lot—did I have the highest word count this time around? Can I celebrate that? Yay! But quantity should never be mistaken for quality, and I always feel like my ten words never really hold the same weight as someone else’s one word. I’ve always had a hard time with writing because I’ve never really felt good at it. 

While said woes are completely unearned because by God was that writing what made this game what it was, I can agree with the sentiment. I mean, let’s be real. I can draw blinks and open and closed mouths but am I the best at it? Can I draw the sexiest man? God no, of course not. I’ve been wallowing in the absolute depths of creative block and there’s often many a time when I just look at my art and sigh. I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll never be the best of anything on a team that I’m on so all I can do is put my all into contributing as much as I can. Yes, all those bells and whistles on our visuals was just me being insecure that what I was doing wasn’t enough to match with the legend that graced my homestead with her presence.

She’s really doing me too much of a service, especially because I think the art is what brings this whole game to life. I wanted to click through just to see that annoying little white boy talk. But I digress… Surely everyone knows the famous Fujimoto quote, “Why do you write, Fujino?” I saw the movie with Lea (well I begged her to see it with me) but it really does distill the creative experience down to the only two things that define it; misery and joy. I grew up with the notion that the only time you could be proud of something was when you were better than everyone else; your classmates, your cousins, the random kids you’ve never met but your mom loves to compare you to. I’m not the best writer in the world, in my university, or in this jam—but if even this amateur work can mean anything to someone else, then everything I’ve done will have been worth it.

What she said (can you tell who’s the actual writer among the two of us?).

IN CASE YOU WERE CURIOUS…

Oh my gosh, you guys actually want to know what was going on in these little ol’ brains? I mean, of course you do, otherwise you’ll skim past this part and never read it, teehee. Well, from what I can speak on, which is the art and the GUI, things were pretty straightforward! I must make a concession: I’ve been working on a superhero game of my own, so I’ve been quite the busy bee designing classic comic book style UI for it. I didn’t want this to just be a repeat case of that project’s sloppy seconds, and thus I decided to take a different approach to the theming! Since our lovely MC and Cypress are not exactly what you’d consider homegrown heroes in the more traditional or typical sense, instead being the products of morally dubious lab shenanigans, I wanted to lean into the technological, futuristic vibe of their origins. Thus, we have a slick and cool pinkish purplish and blue frame setup with a slight glow to certain parts. Mix that with the ever-present fish motif that will never stop haunting MC and you have the rest of the GUI! Small shoutout to the side image frames that are present to show how MC continues to view themself and Cypress as the lab experiments they fought so hard to leave in the past.

Fun fact! Did you know that Cypress was originally going to be a yandere? 

And that you could freak him?

For all you code divers, catch the sneaky little comments we left on variables before naughty time was cut for time…

I’m 2 for 2 on saying I’ll write a yandere and not writing one. I actually do love them, I’m like a budding Dr. Yandere (PhD in Yandere Studies) but they always come out selfish and unrepentant instead. 

And I’m 4/4 drawing the same toxic blond guy that I’ll never get over. I actually quite enjoyed him when he was being an unapologetic butthead, teehee. :3

So I really thought I ate with that theme … but I didn’t :P. If you’ll allow me to get on my high horse… 🤓I envisioned two levels of the theme working; the most surface level interpretation comes from Ending B (spoilers!!!) where you can try all you want to take on the mantle of Cypress, but you’ll never be him. He’s the kind of guy who succeeds no matter where you put him by nature of not only his cishet white male appearance (yessss patriarchy yessssss Eurocentrism) but also because he had the privilege of being human before you ever grew up as one. He comes from a place of love, and the MC for this game never did. 

The second level is, in general, the way that the MC of each ending approaches the impossible task of returning to the past. Ending A is about trying to make him into the sort of child that let his life revolve around you, but he’s long since grown up and become ruthless and he has his own goals unclouded by that naive childhood dream of “we’ll be together forever”. Ending B is the angry acceptance of the fact that he’ll never be that person again, and it’s fine—you’ll hate him anyways. You’ll hate steel for not bending, as the saying goes. But in that same way, you as the MC aren’t who you were either—cruelty has become your nature, and I honestly don’t consider it their fault and rather a product of their circumstances, but you’re no longer the same either.

Allow me to poke my bulbous head in here for a moment and also share some thoughts on how the theme was woven into the game’s essence. No matter how you look at it, in a multitude of ways, Cypress and MC are not them and will never be them (again). Perfect heroes, friends, the experiments from the lab, none of these titles fit the duo we currently know. For Cypress, it’s that he’s not who he appears to be, a golden boy who for some reason gets off on strangling the life out of his long “beloved” friend. For MC, it’s that they’ll never be the type of person they so desperately wish they were, someone who can “spend all their life in the light” without fear of persecution and judgement. And even through all the gripes they share with each other to cement how woe is them, us, the audience, can also recognize that neither of them are exactly good people, no matter the situation, no matter the ending. Everything they claim themselves to be or not be, they simply are not.

Maybe I was thinking too much about it? I always get soo caught up in putting nuance and complexity in the theme it gets warped into something new. You’re (this game) not them (the theme), one could say.

WHAT’S NEXT?

For psychological literary experts as I, we call this the future directions portion and here is where I discuss limitations of my study and what research should come next. But this isn’t a research paper or a lit review, silly, this is a postmortem! In that case, what’s next is…grad school apps! Unfortunately it’s a known fact that the upcoming cycle is going to be brutal and ruthless and I don’t have the co-authorships needed to really get my foot in the door, but I’m in place to get three letters of recs so nonetheless I need to strike while the iron’s hot… But when I don’t get in, the plan is to work as an RA or CRC for a clinical psych lab and use my gap year to build up my CV. And finally take the GRE general and subject test. Oh, you meant games? Let me pass the mic to Lea…

Dot dot dot… So anyways I’m so excited to be stacked with two degrees and unemployed, yay!! I mean, of course I’ll look for a job, don’t you worry your little heads for me like I know you obviously are. But for now and in the meantime, that simply means that I’ll be doing more game dev and YouTube (CATCH THE VIDEO I’M MAKING FOR THIS!!) for all eyes to see (and more fanfic for those who know my secret side acc). And then of course I’ll go back to school eventually, maybe even as the lovely and adorable kouhai of Katherine-senpai!

HOLY MOLY, THESE OTHER GAMES THOUGH?

Um someone call the police, because there’s been a series of murders in the building! Each and every single one of you who submitted something absolutely killed it and I’m actually appalled that there are now 13 other games that exist in this world that I did not come up with and create myself…

Exactly! Taking a page from Michael Smith (hello the only other person who uses their real name, how are you?) we wanted to end on a positive, happy note—our fellow jammates! You didn’t think you were free from our comments, did you? As always, it’s hard to find a way to really organize these so I’m making Lea follow my convention of going from most karma to least karma! A special shoutout for everyone who managed to comment on every game <3

Aliferous; those with wings - The work that every artist needs to read and play through when they’re feeling down on themselves for not being the perfect creator.

Spread Thin: We’re Toast! ~ The horrors of a game dev team! Too scarily real…should I be worried about joining the conglomerate of jamsters? Only time will tell…

Let’s meet tomorow - Gorgeous case study of what dynamic art and text effects can do to establish a chilling mood of something not being quite right.

take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die ~ Beautifully crafted and designed, a decker project to deck our halls with. Taylor Swift needs to watch out!

The Hunter, the Poet, and the Pheasant - Like a warm bowl of soup with a side of familial love and disappointment, it warms my heart but breaks it as well.

The world of a creature ~ How can something look this amazing? You can’t tell us your secrets, Teletuu, I want to remain in mystical, magical awe of you for the rest of my life.

in loving, oblivion - Beautiful visuals that display that the world is indeed not just black and white—it’s gray and red as well!

Make a Fountain, My Chest ~ Never in my life could I find a game written in 36 hours to be so impressive and moving, but you’re always so incredible with the written word time and time again.

Salatan - Master of mystery and an evolving feeling of something being off but still managing to catch me off guard even with my theorist cap on.

Lost Kin ~ Visual direction and impactful writing oh my. The western that westerns need to remember before they ever start trying to do something subpar. You’ve got it all!

But You Are - A seriously raw reflection of our worst fears realized and how the apple can never go completely free of the tree’s touch.

alteraltar: a gentleman jack dilemma ~ Atmosphere? Check. Mood? Check. Piano? Check. All these pieces make up such a fascinating picture of THE gentleman jack. Lowercase intended.

A Mask of His Face - Basically a completely concepted pilot of a story that leaves even the most stoic players with a chill they can’t shake.

This is Katherine and Lea signing off (Until next time!!)