Hello, everyone!

This time I am bringing you a post-mortem for Whisperings of the Ouija, the latest game we did for a game jam, in this case, the GMTK Game Jam 2023.

The theme for the game jam was Roles Reversed and, since we started to watch a lot of low budgets movies like Ouija Shark, we instantly came to the idea of giving the player the power of the ouija and being the evil character of the game.

Team distribution

I think one of the things that went great was how we distributed our tasks for the game. From the programming side, we were two and we were able to almost split the code tasks in a really clear way.

On one side, we had everything related to AI and the things that they could do. This was a huge task since it included the logic of how they did actions, how they move around the house, and how the animations were triggered.

On the other side, we had all the traps, the Ouija mechanic, victory and defeat rules, and the whole UI. These were a lot of smaller tasks that didn’t depend directly on the AI for the characters. Our only contact point, because of this distribution, was an interface where the traps could apply damage to the characters. With only that connection, we were able to do the whole game and this helped a lot to not overlap between us.

Meanwhile, on the art team, I am not an expert on this side but I understood that it worked very well for them to split between the environment and the traps and also between textures and animations. This division, taking into account the strengths of both artists, helped to accomplish a lot of art in a really small amount of time.

An idea that scales

One big goal we usually have in all our game jams is that if the idea scales, that is a huge reason to try to do it during a game jam. What do we mean by an idea that scales? Basically, you can have a really small delivered game and use the remaining time to add more and more content.

In Whisperings of the Ouija, this worked by having a character walking around and having a few objects that would just fall or attack the character when close. From there, we just could have populated the scene and added special interactions until the time ran out.

Thanks to this, I believe that we managed to have a very polished game since around 24 hours inside the game we already had something playable and we were able to just add more and more content.

What didn’t work too well

I think in general, this was a really smooth game jam and almost everything worked perfectly. I think we had two major issues during the production of the game that ended up affecting us in the end.

One of those issues was some bugs with the visual of the characters and the AI. Since that was a huge task and some of the stuff was added in the latest moments, a lot of bugs appear related to that in the end. They weren’t easy to find or to get a clear way how to reproduce it. Because of this, we ended up patching it and hoping for the best. Probably, you will still find this kind of bug but hopefully, we got to cover as much of it as possible.

The other issue was the amount of art needed. If you check the scene, you will find out there are a lot of assets with their textures and almost everything is animated. We managed to solve a lot of this by animating stuff by code but we couldn’t do it for everything and we ended up cutting some content. Luckily for us, it was almost nothing that we had to cut.

Wrap up

I personally had a lot of fun working on this project. It somehow reminded me of working on Ostrich Run a long time ago. I think we made a very polished game for 48 hours of game jam and all ended up very proud of the final result. Of course, we would have loved to have more time to add more stuff we had to cut off but it was still fun to work on.

Also, as a really lovely thing, I got some Twitter interactions with one of the guionist of the Ouija Shark movie thanks to an easter egg we added related to their movie.

Very cool!

— John Migliore (@johnmigliore) July 15, 2023

Overall, it was a great experience and I can’t wait to participate in another game jam. Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more updates related to my other projects!