Disadventure

Edited February 16, 2023

This was the last of the 20 jam games I made in 2020, and by a coincidence of the way I name project folders, it's also the last to be posted here to the farm. Click the image up there to give it a go.

There's not much game, but I like the content. I never try to get all that serious with the tone of the stuff I write, but I think this one manages to be a little sad.

Original devlog / postmortem

With this last jam, the 2020 20 is complete! I was getting a little nervous as the year ticked away, so I tried a different strategy -- I joined a bunch of jams and waited for the theme to be announced, and then only stuck with the one that caused an idea to spring to mind. The theme was Downgrade. I had been playing a ton of WoW, and got excited about the idea of writing a bunch of name generators for various tiers of RPG equipment.

Mechanically, it’s almost identical to Spooky Mountain and Two Words, which is a little bit of a bummer, but with just a few days left in the year I figured beggars couldn’t be choosers. The gameplay differs in that there is nearly none. The options presented to you are guaranteed to advance the overall goal by decrementing the quality of your equipment (or your XP/gold) so you will get almost the same experience by key mashing that you would by choosing carefully. That’s okay though, the point is just to deliver the writing and art.

I had a huge stock of GAN generated images that I wanted to use for something, which I assumed would be a creepy Halloween game. I didn’t end up using them here, instead using Artbreeder to make new ones. It’s a weird situation -- I guess in theory there aren’t any licensing issues with these since they’re brand new images, but they clearly use a lot of high quality source art to seed the generator, and those are just things people could upload. The landscapes it generates are extremely Magic The Gathering. It’s better at making those than it is making objects, but you can just keep hammering on the button until it makes something weird and cool. It has a very robust system for making portraits of sexy anthropomorphic animals. A tool finds its uses, I suppose.

I’m happy with the theme and writing. The end-of-the-journey tone is a fitting capstone to the year’s project, I think. I wish I had had more time to add more content, but adding a location took more time than I expected it would. Part of it was constantly jumping back and forth between messing with the art and doing the writing, which is a bad practice I’ve apparently carried over from my day job. I probably could have served it just as well by making it shorter, but I wanted to use the WoW item quality scale, which meant 6 tiers of gear in each slot.