Beyond the Liminal Pt. 3: The Final Results

Harold Jam 2023: Ascent of the Allies

A funny thing about Ascent of the Allies is that even though I worked my ass off on Stuck in the Liminal, I never really had results in mind. For me, the true prize was the experience, the prototype, and the guaranteed audience to play it and leave feedback. The results still managed to subvert these feelings, however, as I couldn’t help but feel cheated by some of the middling results I had ended up with through voter fraud. Luckily, a few weeks afterward  Human worked with itch.io to remove any fraudulent results. With both Harold Jam 3 and another jam we'll discuss later in the books, let’s see how Stuck in the Liminal truly stacked up!

Overall

5/31
3.550/5.000

My highest official overall finish in a Harold Jam, beating out 8^th out of 32 with Stuck in the Past in 2021. (Show-Stopping Hero had the second highest average score of all categories in Harold Jam 2022 but there was no overall category.) Obviously enough I’m very happy with this, as I’ve made it pretty obvious I often wonder whether I’m a one-trick composer pony and should just stay in my lane. A top 5 finish says f you to that, maybe I’m slightly below okay at making games instead of straight-up terrible. With so many other high-quality and well-rounded entries in this jam, I’m honored to stand amongst the top 5. I highly value balance throughout games in nearly every aspect; drama and comedy, plot and filler, simplicity and difficulty; so it’s nice to see I’m capable of delivering on that myself. Of course I can’t accept this placement without thanking the rest of my team and the beta testers who really made SITL what it was.

Gameplay

5/31
3.350/5.000

This might be the result I’m most proud of. I’ve yammered about how much I valued the core gameplay of Stuck in the Liminal since it’s a prototype for my dream game. Even with its absolutely crippling flaws such as lack of proper indicators in battle, SITL snuck into the top 5 and showed that maybe The Colors of Life is a winning formula after all. Not without some changes, of course; even basic changes I addressed in Definitive could have maybe gotten SITL to top 4 or 3 had I implemented them in the jam version.

Note to self and anyone reading this; a high performance in a jam shouldn’t lead to complacency. If there’s anything to be improved, improve on it. There’s always room to grow; accept that and work towards no less than the best. Case in point, just the changes from the Harold Jam version to Definitive make SITL feel like a completely different game, and there’s still even more gameplay features to prototype that could take it even further.

Music

1/31
4.050/5.000

Barbecue chicken alert! Barbecue chicken alert! The two-time two-time Harold Jam maestro does it again! While I definitely lacked confidence making most of SITL, I at least knew I could write a great soundtrack. It’s true that many of the devs who entered Harold Jam aren’t composers and ended up using default music or music packs. While this isn’t a critical flaw, it naturally gives me an advantage as I can tailor my soundtrack to match any situation. The only other entrants who wrote original music for their games were Violet and BerryB. While I admittedly didn’t play BerryB’s entries and he would later disqualify them on his own accord, I can attest Violet wrote non-stop bangers for both of his entries. With that said, if you combine both of his soundtracks you’ll have enough 8-bit instruments for one Stuck in the Liminal song so he honestly didn’t scare me.

This is where I’d do my award speech, but I pretty much already did that at the end of The Sound and Score. In a nutshell, thanks to all of you who appreciate my music. Not only is it the form of art I’m best at, but it’s also probably my favorite thing in the whole world. I’m so happy I could write a soundtrack off my own instincts instead of tailored to a gimmick and still hit it big. Shoutout to my little brother for also being a Harold Jam champion now too. What can I say? He kicked some aspect.

Comedy

8/31
3.050/5.000

I’m no less surprised at the comedy score than I was in our postmortem. This was my first attempt at writing a more serious story for a game jam, or at least far less tongue-in-cheek than my last two. With Alex and Harold as the game’s only comic relief, a top third finish kinda blows me away. I wholly blame how Alex turned out. I’m not sure if it’s just the way he talks or the way it’s applied to the serious lore-builder role (hoping it’s the latter), but he rubbed off on everyone including myself.

In retrospect, I think the part of SITL that embodies my sense of humor most is the ending cutscene with the form, especially when she pulls out the envelope. The obnoxious red link covering the screen and the Hanna-Barbera klonk sound is such a DJ move. In general I do think I need to loosen up and incorporate a little more of what I think is funny into my games. While I did come up with Alex as a character and admire how he came out, he doesn’t feel as in line with my sense of humor as the form gag.

Graphics

9/31
3.300/5.000

Still a little surprised at this, but compared to the 16^th place finish before the 1-star ratings were removed top 10 is far more reasonable. A far cry from middle of the road. I have a hunch some graphical jank such as new moves awkwardly hovering over level-up bars after battles contributed to the score. Nonetheless, all of us who worked on art deserve a top 10 placement for all their work. I could not have sniffed top 20 in graphics on my own. I feel like my feelings towards this relatively low finish come from me almost valuing effort over actual aesthetic, and I will say the entries that outplaced SITL deserve accolade for their visuals. Gorgeous pixel art, custom portraits, Harold as a guinea pig, dynamic action sequences with beatboxing and crotch Hadoukens; all are as deserving of top 10 as SITL.

Story

8/31
3.200/5.000

Kind of a surprise I placed this high. I do think story took a backseat to gameplay and even got snuffed at times. Aspects were a complete joke in every way and only served as an excuse to prototype TCOL, mostly because I only had enough time to focus on everything else. At the same time, however, I am proud of the way I created a (mostly) original environment, approached each character from their perspective on said environment, and managed to slowly build up the lore and mystery all the way to the end.

With all that said, this means Stuck in the Liminal placed in the single digits in every single category! Top 10 in every category was a hazy goal for Stuck in the Liminal, and it’s very validating knowing it performed that way once you take out all the review bombs.

Feedback Quest 4

But wait, there’s more! Right after Harold Jam 4 ended, I caught wind of Feedback Quest 4, a jam less focused on competing and creating new games and more so on getting feedback on games you’ve already made. This was a day after I decided to make a Definitive Version, so I plowed through it and made way more changes than I expected to. I was even less occupied about results for this jam than Harold Jam, but since we’re here…

Even against 69 other games including beloved RPG Beta Testers classics like Trailblazer, Soul Survivor, and Our Dying World, Stuck in the Liminal held its own. It placed in the top third for every category (if Overall Fun were one spot higher) with music making the top fifth and art falling just shy. SITL received 4 and 5 star ratings across the board with only one 3 given to any category!

More valuable than the results was, obviously, the feedback.  While mostly praise and validation that maybe my dream game is a half-OK idea (which is never bad), the star of the show here is hythrain who streamed SITL live on Twitch. Watching him go through it was a blast, and honest to god he might be the biggest SITL fan out there. He was the only FQ4 attendee to fill out the feedback form (with some really great springboards to boot) and even wants to see an expanded version of SITL building on the characters’ backstories! (I mean technically Stuck in the Past...) Unfortunately it’s pretty obvious that I’m not doing much more with this IP, but if I can take default RPG Maker characters and make them this compelling then by god I need to make a game with original characters ASAP!

So for real this time, we're concluding Stuck in the Liminal and its obnoxiously long series of devlogs. If you've stuck around all this time, I owe you a hearty thanks. Everything else I can say right now I've already said in last devlog's conclusion. Now if I can just get all these priorities off my back, I should really start a full-length game already.