It's been two weeks since AdvXJam2021 ended and I submitted The Will of Arthur Flabbington. I feel it's time to have a look at how the project evolved during the development from a standalone jam game to a demo for a full game.

Originally, the game was meant to be longer. I planned a second act where you control both Jack and Arthur and make them cooperate to find the treasure, as well as a short third act to close the whole arc.

I'm pretty sure I could have done it in two weeks, but a very busy schedule on both professional and private life meant I didn't have enough spare time to dedicate to the game's production. It was quite clear after a couple of days that I had to scrap a big part of the game if I wanted to meet the deadline.

Luckily I always structure my jam games so that there's a short self-contained puzzle chain ending in a bottleneck at the beginning. Should life get in the way I can always prune the game after the bottleneck and I still can submit something that feels complete.

In this case, the natural conclusion was the end of the ritual. Fearing that the game was now too short, I figured I could polish it as much as I could to justify its length. And since I already had the design already laid out for the first part, I could finally try something I always wanted to have, but never could because of my usual workflow: voice acting. I usually make games in an iterative way, meaning that nothing is set in stone and art can spawn new puzzles, or dialog lines may influence new art, and so on. The game text is usually final a couple of minutes before I'm ready to submit, making it impossible for me to send scripts to voice actors in time for the deadline. For Arthur Flabbington, however, I had plenty of time. I forced myself to focus only on dialog and after less than one week I was satisfied with the result and I could give the script to my friends at Tall Story Games for recording. I then spent the rest of the jam adding as much detail as I could to the graphics. Lip sync, special animations, even fine tuning the particle system for the stink lines.

In the end I was extremely pleased with the result, and with all the positive reactions from players and fellow game developers.

To the full game!

I was planning to release the "full" game before end of the year, but then I started falling in love with the concept. Having two playable characters opens a whole lot of possibilities that I want to explore, so I decided to expand the jam plans and make the game longer than originally intended. I don't have a goal right now: I don't want to carry out development for too long, but I also want to give plenty of time to the game.

What I know for sure is that I'll keep you posted on these pages, hoping you'll be interested in knowing where the development is leading me.

Cheers,

Guga