Intro

It's been almost two weeks since I finished my latest jam game Vampire Doctor and I thought I'd make a small "making of" post for fun where I go over techniques I used and what I've learnt.

The final results for my game turned out quite well. Out of 151 entries Vampire Doctor ranked 27th Overall and 12th in Use of the Limitation! There were a lot of great games I was competing against so I'm pretty satisfied with the results.

Inital drafts and ideas

This jam was the Mini Jam 118 with the theme "Vampires". Before the limitation had been revealed I was quite sure already of wanting to adhere to the theme. In the Mini Jams the theme is just for inspiration and it's not a requirement unlike the limitation which was "Blood Is Lethal".

I quickly sketched what I had in mind, which is actually quite accurate to how the game eventually turned out. The idea: the blood has been diseased and it's your job to cure it.

For some reason garlic was supposed to be a vampire cure...

Quickly getting your ideas out of your head onto drawings or text helps the game design process tremendously. You'll get an initial feeling of how the game could work and will see things you'll like and things that won't work. I'd like to call it the "gut feeling", or maybe" intuition" is a better word. Either way, when you see something you like you know it without really realizing why and making that process go as fast as possible is how I like to do it.

It was the fist time I used Godot for a game jam entry which was fun. I have been learning Godot for some time already so it wasn't the first time using the engine, however it made it a bit more of a learning experience.

In the final version of Vampire Doctor you add ingredients via the UI, though my first iteration of the game had a drag-and-drop style interface.

Imagine this but with Godot-shaped cubes.

This was later changed because I ran into some problems with Godot doing it this way. Making it a UI-based system meant I also could make less art and spend time elsewhere. 72 hours isn't a lot of time so you really have to think where the time is best spent.

It was at this time I started to struggle a bit with designing the systems for the game. Because of my lack of experience in Godot as well as less than great programming skills. I had some rudimentary lines of code finished but to not get stuck I started making the art instead.

Graphics

I'm terrible at drawing which isn't ideal when making a game in 2D. However, I am a quite decent 3D-modellerer and that is how I make my 2D art, 3D renders.

I decided to use a 800x800 resolution for the game which made making art assets quite fast because I could render them in an even lower resolution. You don't have to be super accurate when blurriness and pixels hide the flaws.

Made with Blender.

I got the shapes somewhat appealing and accurate to what I wanted to depict and ended up with quite good results just from a few hours of work. With the background scene the lighting helped obscure a lot of flaws as well and it was an advantage that I was going for a darker and grittier style.

Final results. The background and foreground don't even have the same perspectives. Did you notice?

In Godot I later added some particle effects to the candles in the background as well as to the blood vial. This made the graphics feel a lot less static.

Audio

What's a game without audio? Quiet I would say. So much atmosphere can be built with sound. Great audio can help bad graphics. Audio production is what I learnt through my university education, how to record sound effects, foley and voice acting. It's one reason to why I make games, so I can make the audio for them.

I always start out with an ambience track and then build and mix the other sound from that track. I have a field recorder and I had previously recorded some windy ambience which I used for this project. The sound of flipping the books pages I made rubbing two newspapers together and the bubbling of the blood vial is me blowing into a straw in some water which I later pitched and slowed down.

The game without the music

For this game I decided I would have some voice acting. I quickly wrote a back story and got in front of the microphone. Recording the voice acting was a bit rough because I was a sick during the time, which was quite convenient to actually sound like a sick vampire. It was quite difficult not to to ruin a take with my coughing tough. The feedback I got from the voice acting was lovely at least and everyone who commented on my game mentioned it with positivity. It was really fun to make and would love to create more games with voice acting in them.

Some of the audio files. Not all of them made it in.

Having several different version of one type of sound is how you keep the audio from getting repetitive. Here I settled for 3 or 4 clips but usually you want even more. Sometimes you can also use pitch shifting to get different versions. A technique I actually used for some of the sound files.

Sound design takes as much time as any of the other disciplines, give it the time it deserves. Unfortunately, even if I did put attention into the sound design I still didn't have the time to add sounds when interacting with the UI-buttons.

Music

Here's another way to create atmosphere, suspense or a whole other array of feelings: Music.

I wanted some Halloween/spooky style for the music that kind of evoke the feeling of the great halls of a vampire lord. That feeling for me included a church organ. They're pretty big and heavy so I settled with a fairly new purchase of mine instead, an accordion.

Also pretty big and heavy actually.

The bass of an accordion is pretty much the next best thing. Conveniently my accordion is pretty old and shitty which gives it that extra charm. I didn't want perfect pitch anyway!

I have yet to learn how to properly play the accordion so for the ingame music I first played the bass keys and then added treble afterwards.

There's not much else to say about the music really, there's only two tracks. I made something that sounded a bit spooky that fit the graphics and made it loop. It's not a masterpiece but works well enough for a game that people will spend at most 10 mins on.

Putting it all together

So I had the graphics, audio and music at this point but not really a game. I was actually stressing out a bit because I was still struggling putting together one of the systems for the game and the deadline was coming closer. I could not get it to work whatever I did. In the end I actually did a pretty smart thing and removed the whole thing. I realized it wasn't important for the overall game and instead I concentrated on putting the rest of the pieces together. After that ordeal the whole programming stuff actually went smoothly and I added a start menu screen and some final touches.

Final results.

Conclusion

This game was a wild ride to make. It had been a while since I had joined a game jam and I was doing it with an engine that was new to me. Doing this while sick was probably not the best idea. A lot of time went to naps instead of game development.

The comments I received from rating the game told me I could have done a lot better explaining how to play the game as there was some confusion what to do. So that's something I'll try to improve upon and get better at.

I'm happy with what I've made and the results shows that a lot other people liked it as well which fills me with joy.

Thanks for reading! Go play Vampire Doctor if you haven't already!