Insock Out Post Mortem

Introduction

During the Do You Wanna Jam 2024 jam, we created Insock Out. The theme was Inside Out, and we had 9 days to complete the game. The team consisted of Myself (Viktor), Augusto and RedCocoa.

How did I find these peeps? Welp! Augusto just reached out after seeing one of my recruitment posts in various discords and RedCocoa is someone I’ve worked with in the past. Specifically for RedCocoa, I’ve been a huge fan of his Ludum Dare games and have even commissioned him to make music for some of my commercial games. With an Artist and Musician, we had our team assembled and we were ready to rock and roll!

Our goal was to complete the game jam without crunching.

Timeline

• Day 1: Theme was announced and we started brainstorming in a discord group chat. Interestingly enough, this was my first game jam where I didn’t do a single voice call. All of the communication was done asynchronously. We had a few front runner ideas such as a game where you sort socks that rain from the sky or a game where you’re a blob that lives inside the walls of a 2D platformer trying to help a computer protagonist reach the goal.

This is the video I sent to the team after our brainstorming session on Day 1

• Day 2: We picked the idea we liked more and began working.

• Day 3 - 8: We steadily worked on the game. Over the course of this period we only worked approximately 1-2 hours per day. Most of us have jobs and other commitments, so its tough to find the time.

Same placeholder art is in! This is what it looked like 3 days into the jam

• Final Day: we had a build deployed to itch.io and began playtesting. As they were playtesting, I was rapidly deploying updates with bug fixes and quality of life changes according to feedback.

Keep in mind, this entire time I was also deploying changes working on Charles the Bee. I forgot to mention that this game jam aligned with the final weeks of my Charles the Bee development. In hindsight I should’ve told Manisha that I can’t do the jam, oopsie.

What Went Well

The thing that comes to mind the most for myself is how easy the process was. We aimed to minimize crunch and over-working and we hit that aspect out of the park! I think I only spent around 10-20 hours across the 9 day period on the game. Admittedly, that probably wasn’t enough time, but it allowed me to approach the development from a relaxed standpoint.

• Comment from Augusto (Artist): The overall product was almost 100% what we envisioned.
• Comment from RedCocoa (Musician): The main background track came together super fast so I was able to polish it a lot more than I had anticipated, also there was good communication about what to change with the sound effects so I could get them done in time the way everyone liked them

Challenges

The challenge, which is the same challenge I faced in my previous two game jams, was making a cohesive and fun experience. I think what we delivered is ok but it isn’t extraordinary in terms of innovation or design. We combined Fruit Ninja and turning socks inside out. While the modules worked well individually, they don’t necessarily combine to make the game greater than the sum of it’s parts. This is something our feedback from other developers pointed out as well. For my next jam, I will try to crank innovation to the limit in an attempt to make something more cohesive.

• Comment from Augusto (Artist): I learnt that the communication should be stronger and more thorough.
• Comment from RedCocoa (Musician): I initially had a hard time with the sound effects because I had no real idea which direction to go in, which was cleared up in communication fast afterwards though

The Final Product

I’m pleased with what we delivered, especially given the context of the labor we put in. The game scored nicely and it didn’t affect my personal life as much as previous jams did.

• Comment from Augusto (Artist): I’m at ease about the work done and the reception of the players.
• Comment from RedCocoa (Musician): The game has a very nice arcadey feel to it, I enjoy playing it, commenters seemed to generally like it a lot and I think we built a really good game here

Reception

Final Game: After a week of people playing the game we got our scores! We had 32 people leave ratings, and lots of comments as well. Here’s a link to the scores and feedback! https://itch.io/jam/do-you-wanna-jam-2024/rate/2884184

Our best scores was for Art and Audio, 12th and 20th respectively. That kind of distribution is common in the jams I do, it must have something to do with my approach. I always seek to use as much of the art and music that I get sent, and perhaps catering that hard to the art and audio departments hurts the programming department. Anywho!

Overall, we scored 22nd out of 153 (which is top 14%), not bad at all!

Links

• If you want to give the game a try, head over here! https://bluepinstudio.itch.io/insock-out
• Check out Augusto’s stuff here : https://x.com/ago_draws
• Check out RedCocoa’s stuff here : https://initialposition.net

Or you can watch Manisha, the host of the jam, play the game.

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