This has been a very hard entry into the gaming industry. Before the jam started, I was diagnosed with kidney stones and my dad was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
During the course of the jam, I had two rounds of ESWL - one near the beginning and one near the end - and a night spent at the hospital due to a clogged-up kidneay.
My dad’s cancer got rapidly worse and he passed away a week ago to the day, just as the deadline started to hit hard. The grief almost made me give up, but the last times we spoke, he was supportive of me making it in time to the competition.
I also have to say I’m extremely proud of the whole team who kept bringing the art in, even with me at the hospital or the hospice.
This is why version 0.1.0 is so buggy. Everyone’s work was put in, except mine. The submission deadline was in the wee hours of the morning local time, and there was practically zero time for play-testing. I was too busy slapping the pieces together before passing out due to fatigue.
I hope making the initial release Linux-only has the advantage that the game can be fixed during the bug-fixing phase and most people won’t be running it in Linux until then.
The issues with 0.1.0 are twofold:
1) Bugs like exits being active before being activated by the story 1) Animations being broken
Number 1 made it possible to play the game a bit illogically, but it showed the content as-is and the fixes are currently waiting to be released.
Number 2 is a longer story on how the Godot engine and the Escoria framework don’t really deal with Spine animations. They are being repaired and hopefully released at the same time as the scripting bugs.
Maybe the development of Spine support will make it into another blog post or you can just take my word for it that it’s surprisingly non-trivial to bolt that onto a framework that doesn’t really want it.
There is a bug related to game content that we had to work around at the last moment. You’ll recognize it by a line of dialog without voice over. There is also a bug when you start a new game after finishing, which doesn’t matter now, as the game is completable and then quittable.
These bugs will be fixed after the competition.
— Markus Törnqvist, Programmer
