The Confines

Story

*You're a lifer. Over the years, cellmates have come and gone, but you've come to prefer solitude. This new one, however, is different - not your run-of-the-mill thug, thief or murderer - but blood is on his hands nonetheless. Did he deserve to find himself in the confines of this prison?*

Instructions

- *Note: Game may take 20-30 seconds to load*, until which time the canvas will be blank. It isn't a big game at all, but there seem to be some weird errors that delay the loading. (Sorry I haven't worked out how to fix this).
- Dialogue-heavy (or dialogue-only) game. Use the slider to adjust the speed of dialogue (slide all the way to the left to pause the game). Use the number keys on the keyboard to make choices.
- Two main endings (it's also possible to achieve an 'earlier' ending before the two main endings).
- If you see any bugs/typos/weird behaviour, please let me know!

Tools used

- Engine: Godot 4
- Graphics: GIMP and Piskel

Reflection

Beginning the game jam

At the start, as many people did, I thought 'hmm... space' and pretty quickly started leaning towards some kind of space setting, possibly about smuggling goodies between various destinations. But I quickly ran into a problem: artistic skill (or an extreme lack thereof). I tried doing some pixel art in GIMP but (a) it took me ages to even come up with a few assets, and (b) they really weren't... good. At all. (see below)

*Shelved space game*

The other big problem was that I was pretty sure even if I was able to create reasonable art for it, my ideas for making the game halfway engaging just weren't possible in the time constraints (I was pretty sure I was overscoping).

Beginning again, and getting to the end

So after the first 6 hours or so, I pushed that aside and turned to my alternative idea: a narrative, dialogue based game set inside a prison cell - which ticked the boxes: not much art required (1 static background, static furniture, 1 or 2 animated human silhouettes); and hopefully something "complete" might be achievable, *even* taking into account my level of skill and experience (none to extremely low).

*Programmer art: 1 animated human silhouette coming up :white_check_mark:*

In the end of it, honestly I'm pretty happy. The dialogue tree is a fair bit more linear than I'd have liked (even with me spending 5 hours on the final night to write 70% of it), but I still managed to get done almost the amount of content I was hoping for. Also a small victory: my 'programmer art' actually looks almost moderately passable (obviously has nothing on 90% of entrants, but a huge step up from my last LD, where the 'characters' were... pixellated circles). One thing it's definitely missing is audio - I would also have liked to add music, since composing music to go with a story/setting is absolutely something I enjoy, just didn't have time to do it this time around sadly.

What have I learnt?

There were a lot of 'firsts' in this LD for me, including:
- First time using Godot 4 (or any mainstream game engine for that matter)
- First time making a UI for a game
- First time making a dialogue tree
- Pretty much my first time making any sort of graphics

And, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but since LD49 (where I submitted my first ever 'game') - I've pretty much done... nothing in the game dev space - making this my second attempt at a game, ever. Honestly, I'm well aware that my entry is poor quality *in relative terms* - but I learnt last time that, ___particularly when you're just starting out, results don't matter that much___. This time around, I've once again learnt a huge amount in one weekend, and unlike last time, I like to think that I actually came out of this LD with something possibly resembling a 'minimum viable product', so I feel like this has been a really rewarding experience overall.