Behind the Liminal Pt. 7: Overall - The Journey

There’s a common theme through my experiences entering game jams; long, emotional rollercoaster odysseys. I work way too hard on these stupid little jam games, and they come with high highs and low lows. Today we’ll be covering the journey of Stuck in the Liminal and the more psychological aspects that would be hard to describe earlier. I apologize in advance for vent posting.

Before The Liminal

There was a certain euphoria I felt after finishing Stuck in the Past. This overwhelming excitement of a future to come, of a newfound passion waiting to unfold.

The only other time this happened was when Harold Jam 2023 was announced.

In retrospect it’s pretty funny. As I mentioned before, the last Harold Jam I overexerted myself on a concept that just wasn’t fun in retrospect and burned myself out bad. I wasn’t even going to enter this jam; just compose a soundtrack for someone else and that would be enough.  If I were to make my own game, it would probably be a total joke game as is commonplace in Harold Jam.

Yet something about finally being able to live that waking dream awoke that passion in me. I had been contemplating pursuing what would become Stuck in the Liminal for Ascent of the Allies, but when the theme was revealed to be based on characters other than Harold it all clicked. I’d be able to take my grand idea for The Colors of Life, turn it into an even more refined testbed, and have an immediate audience in the form of the other attendees! I could even throw in a form at the end and get priceless feedback on where I could improve! This could be absolutely pivotal for my passion project! Immediately I opened JummBox and slammed out half of the title theme. All the while, visions of Reid lost in a white void and scaling a huge tower danced in my mind. For the first time in years, I was on fire.

There was still business to be done outside of SITL though; I still had yet to prototype the battle system! I had been working on a prototype on and off, and I wanted it done before jam time started to make sure everything was working and ready to go. If the prototype were a total bust, I may not have gone further with SITL. As you can tell reading this, it did. I got some valuable feedback on the prototype to carry over to SITL, and everything else was a simple copy-paste job which probably opened another Harold Jam loophole. Sorry Human! Rest assured actual development in the game's rpgproject file did not begin until jam time.

The Objectives

There was always a sense of doubt over whether my grandiose story idea would work with the objectives. As attached as I was growing to the plot and characters, I had to force myself to think about adapting on the fly or scrapping my idea entirely. So when the objectives went up…

I did not have to change a thing.

This was what cemented SITL as my Ascent of the Allies entry. I could jump headfirst into the process without having to worry about reworking the plot, which I did without hesitation. This only served to really build the hype behind Stuck in the Liminal and my devotion to the concept. The only change I made was implementing a more literal ascent for the tower to sit on just to make sure I really hit that requirement.

No Time

Unfortunately, almost everything happened to align over the course of March and I didn’t have nearly as much time to work on it as I expected. My normally part-time job suddenly doubled to pretty much full time for at least half the jam period, leaving me only able to theorycraft until the evenings when I could actually make progress. I also was on trial for composer and sound designer for Toontown Rewritten this month, and the moment I’d hear back about any changes I could make to my trial piece SITL would take a backseat until that was over with.  I constantly felt like I had the whole game left to finish and was never sure if I'd actually have something complete by the deadline or not. There was even a day where I didn't have the energy to get anything done and another when I was gone the entire day and couldn’t make any progress. Miraculously, the latter was the day Violet Spinel volunteered to hop on as a co-developer and ended up revising the party’s movesets. SITL wouldn’t have been nearly as good without these changes, and that’s if it would have been finished at all!

Daylight Savings Time was also during jam time. Because I needed my circadian rhythm to be destroyed so badly I would wake up for work completely numb. It genuinely felt like God was laughing at me, albeit that’s how I feel every single day of my life. There was also a day I took a huge chunk out of to apply for a full-time job, which I really do need at this point. (Still waiting to hear back after my second interview.) In retrospect, this jam was a nice preview at how much time and energy I’d have when working normal people hours and how to scope accordingly next time. Spoiler: far smaller than this game.

Out of Focus

So I don’t have a lot of time to make this game, right? Therefore I should be laser focused on what’s important and casting smaller details to the wayside. It’s the core gameplay loop that defines this game after all.

Imagine DJ actually doing that.

Almost as damning as my lack of time was how I spent it. I was scatterbrained and kept jumping from task to task, which sometimes caused me to freeze up. I also overthought decisions that shouldn’t have mattered as much as they did and ended up holding back my progress. How should this map look? Is it laid out well enough? Do I go for a different resolution and therefore completely change the map altogether?  Does this shade of yellow feel 8-bit enough? I can’t tell you how much time I wasted doodling down party movesets in the GDD that wouldn’t even be used; it had to have been like a quarter of development time. I didn’t plan enough ahead of time and I’d say I suffered for it if I didn’t actually get the game done.

Also RPG Maker kept crashing while I was doing database work for the Technicolor Slime fight. That was very fun and time-efficient.

The Doubt

About halfway through the jam, my schedule finally began to open up. With a mostly open afternoon in front of me, I sat down ready to start devving. And how did I kick this wide open day off?

Almost immediately, a dark cloud fell upon my shoulders and blinded my vision. What the hell was I even doing? Physically damaging myself to prototype a game when I already know how it should work? A game I can’t even guarantee will be made at all? I already knew damn well I wasn’t learning anything from last Harold Jam, as I once again underestimated my scope and physically and mentally destroyed myself in the process. I told myself I’d do a quick joke entry and be done; why am I here? Why am I once again turning my love for creating into debilitating stress and anxiety? Why am I doing this to myself?

There was a massive difference between this year and last year though. While last Harold Jam I was asking myself these issues and trying to figure them out solo, this time I had a team behind me. Of course I felt weird dumping mental stuff on them, but being able to work through these issues together saved me. Even then, though, this doubt kept coming back. I can’t design party members, I can’t balance enemies, I can’t lay out maps; I have no idea what I’m doing! Should I even be making games at all? Is my love for storytelling best conveyed through written word? Visual novels? Concept albums, even? Am I even worthy of trying to make a game in the first place? Making an obnoxiously huge jam game mostly on my own is enough of a struggle, but this constant doubt amplified it.

It came to another head after a particularly rough night. I had started writing dialogue for Alex and Reid’s Aspects and they just did not click with me. Alex felt like a throwaway joke character whose one gimmick was bad grammar, while the Aspects felt like a Joss Whedon gag that dragged on for way too long. My computer also blue screened in the middle of some tileset work and then booted into a black screen which was terrifying. I fixed it with a System Restore and pretty much lost no time, but still. On top of all of this, I still had like half the game to go and a week left to do it. I woke up a few hours earlier the next morning and pretty much had an episode in my bed. Thankfully, having a particularly refreshing day at work woke me up a bit, and when I got home I got six songs done without even touching the engine. This was the best move I could have made. I was able to focus on my strengths and make progress while taking a break from the engine. Additionally, seeing most of the music checked off in my GDD for the first time was a huge motivator for the days to come.

I guess at the end of the day my standards are obnoxiously high no matter what I pursue. I always know my work can be better and strive to better myself every day, but that comes at the cost of never being satisfied with what I make in the current moment. I understand it’s a long process and we as a species value hard work, but it’s always hard for me to close the door on something I know isn’t good enough for myself. While I'm ultimately very satisfied with how SITL turned out, I'll always keep thinking about how much better I could have sold my idea had I given myself more time to test and work out any kinks.

The Sprint

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that I work at the community college I graduated from. Part-time gig I picked up while studying and stayed with after I graduated so I could still make bank while looking for full-time work. Colleges get spring break. Therefore employees can request spring break off. Spring break for me was during the final week of the jam.

You bet your ass I took that week off.

I didn’t have any grandiose vacation plans and the weather wasn’t exactly amazing, but I planned to commence what I called The Sprint. Six consecutive days off to make one final push to get SITL to completion. I’d say I was a little over halfway done by the beginning of The Sprint, but if I applied myself enough maybe I could finish!

What really made me realize the value of The Sprint was finishing and releasing a second alpha build in the time I would have spent working a dead Monday morning staring at the clock and fiddling with my to-do list; something I carried over from work into SITL and a real lifesaver at that. I blasted through the rest of the game and not only released a beta two days before the deadline but also submitted it as a backup in case the final build had issues. While I regretted the possibility of only having two days of beta testing earlier on, now it felt like so much extra testing time. Nonetheless, I kept carrying on at full speed, really burning the midnight oil to get some big progress made. Testing feedback from my little brother, Violet Spinel, Nateplays95, and Mooglerampage came in clutch as I patched out some huge oversights while applying the finishing touches.

The final day in particular pretty much redefined how the game played. One common gripe was how many excess inputs the game required. At this time, you had to manually switch characters and Aspects to camouflage or use overworld abilities. I considered a solution for this low-priority at first, but I remembered feedback from those who played Stuck in the Past and became frustrated to the point of quitting halfway in. Realizing that this game was far too important to have any kind of frustrating tedium, I hammered out automatic party and Aspect switching far quicker than I expected. Seeing it ingame was euphoric. I also buffed Counter to deal more damage and increase target rate so it would work more often, which turned it into a completely different tool. On top of all this, I revised some of the visual indicators and dialogue during the Technicolor Slime fight to make it a little more obvious how to fight it. It’s funny how much of a difference that last day of development can make; shoutout to Stuck in the Past where save points were added less than 24 hours to the deadline.

The End

Above all else, the most important part of this process was grit. Guts. Resilience and resolve. Passion for the process. Loving the parts you hate. Something I’ve valued for years. There’s a damn good reason I trauma dumped all over you earlier. Sure the process was challenging, but it also was the one thing between me and a finished prototype of my dream game with a guaranteed audience. Not only did I will it within myself to make it to the top despite all in front of me, but as my pace picked up I realized something along the way.

Making this game was fun. Developing solutions to issues testers pointed out on the fly was fun. Creating characters with personality, goals, and desires was fun. Writing original music was fun. This was no tedious Show-Stopping Hero; I loved making this game! In fact, during the last three hours before the deadline I realized I didn’t want it to be over! Finishing Stuck in the Past two years ago may have been a euphoric revelation, but even then it never got to that point. To pull such a crazy 180 over the course of development made me realize maybe I didn’t hate making games after all. Maybe I just hated deadline stress. Maybe I hated the anxiety that comes with expectations, both from myself and others. Maybe I was right when I realized making games was something I truly loved after making SITP.

And the funny part? During the last few days of the jam, I lay awake in my bed and thought up another battle system. It all comes back around. This battle system is something I’ve been seriously ruminating on, and I may want to turn it into a game before Colors of Life just to build my dev experience while not taking it as seriously. I’m even thinking about using the plot of the abandoned TCOL “prototype” which you can read about in my Show-Stopping Hero postmortem (although I've long scrapped the Technicolor Dreamcoat). Very very excited to see where it goes!

The Parallel

A very funny coincidence arose once all was said and done. To recap:

• I started off hesitant but jumped into the process a little too quickly and confidently.
• I realized I had no idea what I was doing and I had bitten off more than I can chew.
• Someone else jumped in early on to save my effort from a potentially disastrous situation and became involved with the team.
• I built up a big cool team full of really awesome friends and started to build confidence.
• My brother got involved at some point.
• I realize the entire process may not have been worth it at all.

This may sound like a story that’s already out there. Hell, it probably is. But to my team and I, this is almost an exact mirror of The Colors of Life’s plot! Over the years, our main character has gone from a funny gimmick furry to someone whose struggles and challenges indirectly mirror my own. To actually experience the process I’m having my own MC go through, painful as it may have been, is huge. I never exactly figured how things would turn out at the end of my plot, but maybe through this journey I can realize how it all ends. Not only did I see things to the end despite all my hardships, I rediscovered what I love about making games and swore to capitalize on it. Perhaps our main character’s journey ends in a similar way?

Up next, The Cutting Room Floor where good ideas under tight deadlines go to die. This will be the last Behind the Liminal before results are revealed!