Sceal - what's the story?

This is a brain dump of developing "Scéal - The Story Of Ireland" for HAGJ5 (Historically Accurate Game Jam 5).

Scéal is the irish (gaelic language) word for story.

How I came up with the original Idea

In the weeks leading up to the start of the Jam, the organisers ran a voting system to choose the theme for the Jam.
The topics were eventually reduced down to two:

    Witchcraft and Your Country's History.

At this point I starting thinking about game ideas for both. I really did not want to do witchcraft - I had a hunch that if witchcraft was chosen we would have 100 very similar games. The last Jams them was Mythology which is a lot broader than witchcraft - and we still got about 15 games about the Minotaur (yes - I played all of them LOL).

Nevertheless, inspiration struck and a very viable idea for witchcraft came into my head.

Your Country's History looked way more appealing - I've had a notion to do the entire history of Ireland as a game for some time so maybe this was the time.

In the event, Your Country's History was voted as the theme so Irish History it was.

1. Timeline

The choice of start time for the JAM was, in my timezone, Midnight 31/Dec/2021.

I was actually out on the street blowing my Vuvuzela to ring in the new year.

I think it was quite some time into the new year before the topic was announced as the Jam organisers "weren't available" LOL.

I wasn't due back at work until Wednesday 5th December so that gave 4 full days to work on the game, then 3 works days, and the final weekend to finish off.

2. The Game

I had the basic idea of dividing the history into Eras, and decided to have 5 events for each era.

I had an alternative idea for a fighting zombies type game based on the Cranberries song (Zombie) but it seemed too similar to my HAGJ4 entry, so I shelved it.

I came up with a puzzle game as a sort of a cross between the traditional 4x4 slide puzzle game and a 2D Rubix cube.

I wasn't sure of the mechanics, but decided to implement a grid of tiles and see what came out of it.

The idea being to construct 2x2 pictures for the 5 events to complete an era.

I decided on an odd number of rows and columns with a window in the very center - moving tiles to this window activated it - and gave actions to the player.
After some experimentation, I had actions to slide rows and columns, swap tiles, destroy tiles, reveal hidden tiles.

I then added 'bad' tiles - rocks, closed eyes (hide all tiles) and wolves (mix up the tiles).

I had more ideas such as a bad tile that 'ate' adjacent good tiles, but they never made it in.

The bulk of the time was taken up drawing the tiles and events.

Each event required 4xTiles and 1 Event graphic. I drew the first era by hand and realised there was not going to be enough time to draw them all like that. I also added in a bogus event for each era which meant 6 (events) x 4 (tiles) x 7 (eras) = 168 tiles and 42 events to draw.

I shortcutted by drawing the events first and them dividing them into 4 pieces in my paint program.

Images were taken from Wikipedia and other free sources.

I also had to source texts for all the events from Wikipedia.

On Friday afternoon, I got this nagging feeling in my brain that the Jam might be ending tonight instead of Sunday.

I was pretty sure it wasn't but I double checked anyway and found it was ending on Saturday!!! The previous Jam went from Friday night to the Sunday night 9 days later. I had assumed this one would be the same.

Good job I checked but now I had a day less.

I ended up spending most of Saturday typing in the event texts. I aimed to be submitted by 9pm giving me 3 hours for any disasters. Rather than having to play the game through and achieve the events, I put some debug code in to display the event text of the first event (Landbridge to Mainland Britain).

I submitted a working version at about 6pm, and spend a couple of hours adding some sounds in for the tiles.

I created the sounds in FLStudio - a software studio music package.

3. Development environment

The game was written in C# using the .net core framework and the monogame development package.

If you are interested it's here: https://www.monogame.net/

This allows the game to be developed in Windows but built and run for multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX (used in Apple PCs)). Unfortunately, it does not produce a browser version.

Graphics were done in Paint Shop Pro 2021.

Sounds were done in FLStudio.

4. Full disclosure

I am a software developer by profession.

I  have a published game on Steam so I have gone through that process of commercial release also.

There's a free demo on itch if you are interested https://jonathanmcc.itch.io/dragons-lunch-demo

5. Lessons Learned - take aways

Many years spent programming and I still made a rookie mistake. I forgot to take out the debug code mentioned above, and as a result all events had the same description text. This was spotted by one of the players.

On reflection, this happened due to tiredness on Saturday as I tried to cram all the work left into the last day. I could feel my brain dulling in the evening and did deliberately stop as I was afraid I would screw something up. Of course I was too late.

Another round of testing before uploading should have caught it, but I would have had to have got to the second event to notice it.

I noticed I was way more hyped up for my first jam than this time (which was my second).

This maybe due to the time of year - I really wasn't keen on Jamming the first week of January.

In the end though, it was quite enjoyable so my misgivings were misplaced.

Finally, I learned a lot about other country's history from playing the other games.

I also found it really stimulating to see other developers ideas.

I noticed a few entries based on Witchcraft - that made me pause for thought. One part of me wondered what was the point of the voting system, if people were simply going to ignore it.

Let's face it, you can probably shoehorn any category into another if you try hard enough.

Most of the games were very similar so I was glad witchcraft was not chosen.

6. General thoughts about the Jam

I posted at length in my post-mortem of the previous Jam entry about the format of the Jam and I won't repeat myself too much here. Nothing changed since then so I feel the same problems exist.

It's really unclear for new Jam entrants how the Jam works. The current instructions/rules are
    a. hard to find
    b. do not cover everything

The identical questions to the ones I asked 6 months ago when I was new, were asked again by many of the new people. This will happen again in HAGJ6 unless something changes.

- The contestants being the judges does not work.

From looking at the stats, only a fraction of contestants are willing to do this.

- There is a divide between Browser based entries and non browser based ones. The general feel from Discord is most people are not willing to download the games to play them and limit themselves to the browser based ones. This is understandable as there are risks involved but when its the actual judges (as the contestants are the judges) who are saying this, then you don't really have a level playing field.

The obvious solution is to make the Jam browser based only, and the non-browser developers can either move on to a different JAM or change development environment.

7. Parting thoughts
If I was to give one piece of advice, having playing all the games, it would be this:

    Make your game easy to figure out how to play!

Hopefully, I will take my own advice next time as Scéal definitely had this problem :).

Happy Coding!

Thank you for reading. These are just my opinions so you are at liberty to disagree with anything.