DevLog1: Starting to turn broken gamejam project to something more

Here we go. 

For a long time I’ve wanted to take one of my prototypes from gamejam and actually finish something and after coming across Continue Your Game: The Jam, this felt like a good time to write down my progress. I had developed this game for over a month before finding this jam, so I’ll post my progress already done inside couple days to catch up and try to keep up weekly devlogs to motivate myself moving forward.

So, let’s see, how this all started:

GMTK 2025 30th July - 3rd August
Theme: loop
Time: 96 hours
One person team

First I wasn’t too inspired by this theme, as at this time I wasn’t especially interested in making abstract games and fast game loops, even though it would probably be good to try to make them too.

Still I thought about loop and different meanings. My friend had made music inspired by my cyberpunk roleplaying adventure (Take a listen of Census Nebula) and that brought the idea of hacker, but still I was looking for inspiration. Then I remembered that Chicago has a central business area that gets its name from L-train. It would offer different kind of loop in gameplay, as stations go by again and again, but player could affect the loop by hacking train to skip station or stations to affect world outside. Passengers would act like a resource, their phones, cyberware etc having components that you need to upgrade your own equipment, also making Players moral aspect interesting, as they fight against big brother style enemy, but both view people as resources. Maybe gameplay could have cyberdeck, upgrades and social engineering instead of guns and viruses, false identities, blackmail material and other revolutionaries as bullets and resources? This is flying off the handle already…

Usually I like to make my own 2d art, but this was already too big of an idea to get even prototyped during jam, so I went to search for free to use sprites and found wonderful sprites from craftpix that had townspeople and even a guy in a wheelchair. 

Maybe there could be an element of choice for the player to think do you want to steal from a guy in a wheelchair? Or someone else, do they need their tech to work? Maybe going forward, your action could have unseen consequences? I was already thinking about bigger things beyond the jam, so I probably knew I wouldn’t get anything finished done.

For story side, I’ve been thinking about big stories with small perspectives, limited to one place, like bottle episodes in TV series or movie Locke that happens all inside the car. In my teens, I’ve worked in gas station and seeing people for only a moment but you could get a picture about their lives and happenings outside. Maybe that could be interesting as there is clear routine and baseline in just going around in the train, so small changes could tell a lot about this world.

Then started the development. Besides assets that I had, I work alone, so I tried to scope small. Only sidescroller movement. Simple sprites for stations, simple minigame to steal components by holding key and releasing it at the right time. Train itself doesn’t move, only the background. But the biggest challenge for the jam was to get passengers to wait and travel the train.

I made a simple waypoint system to avoid path finding. Walking animation was disabled until the train had stopped and their movement speed was the same as stations, to create the illusion of people waiting for the train. I was thinking about just having a sprite of a crowd of people on station and spawning passengers just at the door, but somehow it is important to me to see them waiting and leaving to further create the illusion of these NPCs having life outside.

I’m still proud of this idea, but it did sabotage my whole jam. I don’t code often, usually only once a year for GMTK gamejam, so my movement script and way to use it seemed easier, but later I understood that I just made things harder for myself. Also layering was a big problem that I noticed only at the tail end of the jam. I had used z-axis to sort everything, to keep tight control of all visual elements, placing them by hand, but passengers starting behind train cart and them sorting them in front as they reach door worked okey with my movement and animation script, but when I changed them to be prefabs and spawned them, their layering went nuts and I used rest of my time trying to fix them and in the end just created overlays to hide layering problem in z-axis change.

In the end, I didn’t get multiple traincarts, hacking minigame or working layering for the jam time, but what I got was a inspiration and feeling that this idea could be doable.

So lets embark on a development journey to get this idea at least prototyped properly, maybe with a small demo to see if this idea has any legs going forward.