Back in February, I planned out my next several months to help stay on track for the full episode's release this Fall. I had a good chunk of work planned for April:

• Mechanics - prototype + implement all "Must-Have" new mechanics for the full game
• Background Art - finish 1-2 new backgrounds (to avoid screwing up my wrists again drawing all of them at the last minute) (also because I learned that how I draw the backgrounds impacts how I write the scenes)
• Sprite Art - finish 1-2 new sprites
• Music - fully flesh out a placeholder track for 1-2 BGM pieces
• Narrative - write first draft of all scenes through a certain point in the game (naturally these scenes will change when it comes time to implement, that's just how this goes)
• Marketing - prepare + announce 100 Wishlists celebration; make + publish press kit

Which is a lot, but doable if I'm working at it consistently. I'm only working part-time, and Amadeus is  my "real" job, so to speak. Right?

Wellllllllll...... there's this little thing called the Mystery Game Jam.

I heard about it, and thought back to my previous devlog where I discussed at length how doing other random projects when I was "supposed" to be working on Amadeus has been so valuable for me. I also felt that it would be wise to get more mystery writing experience doing something low-stakes and small-scope, to pull away from this single massive project for a bit and just work on the craft of writing. It would help me learn more about my own process. Also, it would be fun!

So I got a group of people together and gave myself the role of writing our game. I've had a ton of help brainstorming, solving plot issues, and generally improving things thanks to my teammates; the whole process has been collaborative (which is what makes game jams fun). However, I've been responsible for actually writing all of it.

As a result Amadeus had to get put on the backburner, because it turns out that brainstorming + outlining + coordinating + finalizing + writing-with-full-implementation-directions, a complete mystery story- that doesn't have a thousand plotholes- in a month, is a ton of work. Fun work! But a lot of it. As a result, what I actually accomplished from my April to-do list for Amadeus is closer to...

• Prototyped "save/load" mechanic
• Implemented mechanic that can create pauses mid-text-appearance for dramatic effect
• Researched and sketched 1 new point-and-click background
• Have sketches for 2 BGM pieces (but both need to be more fleshed out to be usable as placeholders)
• Outlined draft of narrative for 1 new scene in the intro (but needs a lot more detail/workshopping)
• Planned 100 Wishlists celebration (but didn't get everything ready to announce)
• Made draft + format of press kit

Which is, honestly, still a decent chunk! I'll have to do some work readjusting next month's to-do list to account for the fact I'm a little behind, but it's reassuring to see that even in a month where most of my energy was dedicated to a side project, I still got a lot done.

This is where the portion of the devlog directly relevant to the game Amadeus: A Riddle for Thee draws to a close. That 100 wishlists celebration announcement will be coming next month, along with a separate announcement. Lots of news coming in May!

As always, all relevant links here: https://linktr.ee/amadeusgame - I will also add our Mystery Jam game here for a bit when it comes out, so you all have something new to play! Check back after May 5, 10PM Pacific!

For the remainder of this log, I want to discuss the process of writing our Mystery Jam game. I have learned so much from it and it's been an incredibly rewarding (if, at times, difficult) process. Collaborations are such a completely different beast from solo projects.

Mystery Game Jam Retrospective

It's a bit strange to write a retrospective when the game jam isn't actually over yet, but my role is mostly finished and I've handed it off to our implementation guy who is hard at work. You're doing great, S1x. Keep it up!

I've done a ton of game jams in the past, but they were always weekend-long jams and I was always just doing audio for them. I've never done a month-long jam before, and I've never taken on a primary role that wasn't as a musician. This was a lot of firsts for me.

I truly believe that game jams don't teach you as much about game development as they teach you about project management. To actually finish a game, so many things have to happen that are all interdependent, and you have to figure out what to do first and who to talk to at what stage so it all somehow comes together on a super-strict deadline. This interdependency is even more apparent for mystery games, where it's fully expected that the player will be paying attention to clues all across text, visuals, and interface. You can't give a completely finalized asset list to artists until you know exactly what every aspect of your mystery will be, otherwise you'll end up forcing your icon artist to re-draw the same asset a bunch of times to match the tweaks you made to the story.

So the biggest obstacle in making this game was that we didn't reach the "details of mystery are completely finalized" stage until over halfway through the month, mostly because I kept putting it off (I'd overwhelmed myself by giving myself all this and also Amadeus homework). We also had to coordinate across time zones and work schedules which introduced additional delays. We got to that point eventually though! Notably, once I had figured out some important things...

• This is a collaboration. I was trying to do too much big braining on my own at times when what I really needed to do was schedule a voice call with teammates and bounce ideas. Talking things out with our background artist in particular helped a lot with getting past some hurdles that were really not working.
• I am not a writer who can design a mystery puzzle in a vacuum and then add characters as set dressing on top. Once I realized I was stuck, I decided to just start writing out the prologue scene to get a feel for the characters and setting; this forced me to create unique characters who had a reason to be there, and those reasons gave me ideas for the mystery. It turns out that designing a puzzle is a lot like solving a puzzle: if one angle isn't working, take a break and try another angle. You'll learn more about the puzzle, how it works, and eventually all that knowledge will come together and you'll figure it out.
• This is a game jam game. This is (probably) not going to be anyone's magnum opus. This is going to be a very fun silly knockoff Ace Attorney game with a robot detective. I'm generally good at keeping a chill attitude for weekend-long game jams, but because we had a month I was taking it way too seriously at first.
• Most importantly... it's not reasonable to write an entire new mystery from start to end in a month while also doing a ton of work on Amadeus and working part-time. So I eventually told myself it was OK to ignore everything else except work and the game jam for a while, and focus on this.

(...I also spent about 20 hours obsessively working on my Very Spoilery Ghost Trick ROMhack when I was overwhelmed, as a sort of escape. It was obvious that my brain was refusing to work on the game jam so I just let it do what it wanted for a few days. Sometimes the ADHD wins.)

Reaching that key point-- the point where all of the details were finalized and everyone knew exactly what needed to get done-- was a huge milestone. But even after that, I still had to actually write the words for all of it. Writing in the sense of "mapping out the major plot beats and details of the mystery," and writing in the sense of "actually writing, line-by-line, the text of the game along with implementation instructions" are completely different skillsets. I already knew this from my experience working on Amadeus, but I had to re-learn it here.

Fortunately, by the time I was sitting down writing words, our musician had written some total bangers for the game and I was able to listen to those to really set the tone for what I was writing. If a certain dialogue box cues the "totally-not-objection" theme, then the energy for those next few dialogue entries should be VERY high energy. Listening to that theme while writing made sure it matched! And once our player character artist had designed the MC, I was able to find that character's "voice" much more easily to match the energy of that character. The work of other teammates helped inspire me to do my own work, and have more fun doing it.

I really like doing these collaborations because it's fun to make something completely different than what I would make alone. I also like collaborating because there are certain changes I'm forced to make to my workflow in order to make life easier for my teammates. It forces me to be more organized. I have to do more pre-planning so I'm not forcing artists to revise their work 20 times, and so the implementation engineer only has to implement once with a few exceptions, and can easily swap out placeholder assets when those come in. Thinking ahead like this is a really good habit to get into in general! Even as a solo dev if I learn to make my own life easier in this way I will save myself the headache.

Will I learn that lesson? Most definitely not. But hopefully I'll take something away from this. For example, the awesome beautiful spreadsheet I made to format my scripts for implementation:

(I'm still not the easiest person to work with, though. I'm kind of bossy. While I do try to at least not be every artist's worst nightmare, it's definitely in everyone's best interest that my big major long-term project is a solo work.)

I'm excited to see how it all comes together in the very end. I'm excited to see what people think of it. Where, on the spectrum of "too obvious" to "moon logic," am I landing on average? Just how weird is the pacing of reveals? These are questions that a non-game-jam game would be able to answer in a playtesting/beta phase, but this is a game jam game, so you get what you get. Making it has been really fun. Look forward to it when it comes out! It will be posted by S1xplus, our implementation engineer. It should end up on my itch page as well.

Look out for ROBOT DETECTIVE: THE CASE OF THE AUTOMURDERATED INTERN (working title)!!