The Game Jam

This project has arrived out of the blue really, from a recent game jam, but I wasn't even intending to enter a jam; it just caught my eye because of the name! It was the UPLIFTING game jam.

I was actually in the middle of another project at the time, called Sprite Breaker, a Breakout clone (which I should publish an Itch page for actually!), when I just happened to notice the jam... something made me look at the upcoming jams even though I wasn't in a place to join one really!

The "uplifting" caught my eye and made me look. The description read, "Make a game that uplifts, inspires, and brings joy. Make us smile. Help us heal. Show us hope. Remind us what love is all about. Help us find peace. Let’s make games that feel like a warm hug" - just my kind of thing! So I bookmarked it and waited for the theme announcement.

An Uplifting Game About... Halloween!?

When the theme dropped I was gutted - Halloween! How on earth was I supposed to make an uplifting game with that theme? I personally am not a fan of Halloween, I just think of horror and gore and jump scares, all of which I dislike immensely. 

At first I thought that this simply wasn't something that I could make work so I figured I'd skip the jam but that "uplifting" idea just kept tugging at me so I decided to try and brainstorm some ideas to see if I could find something vaguely fitting both themes.

3 Prototypes

Up until this point I had only made remakes of little arcade games - Pong, Flappy Bird, Asteroids, Snake etc and this time I wanted to make something that wasn't an action game - some kind of light strategy.

My first idea was that of a Monster Cafe and I spent way too much time on the prototype as at this time I hadn't really considered prototyping as I thing really, and I just assumed I would continue to make the game as soon as I got the idea. After three days I realised sadly that I just didn't like it. It certainly fulfilled the Halloween theme well enough, but just didn't feel particularly uplifting.

Next, I thought about doing a card game but I had never really played a card game and didn't know much about them. I looked in my Steam Library for inspiration, found quite a few and came up with another prototype (this time only spending a short amount of time on it!) that was based around a card battler:

This had a similar problem to the previous one. Whilst it was definitely Halloween themed and the characters were somewhat cute, that didn't really make it uplifting. 

So I kept brainstorming and eventually came up with a variation on the card game idea, and still using cake, but this time I settled on an idea for the gameplay which felt genuinely uplifting. I knew that it was the kind of game that I would want to play:

I started off with a name of "Treat the Streets" which I later changed to Sugar in Shadows. 

Now that I had an idea that I knew I wanted to run with, it was time to get to work! Stay tuned for the next devlog in the series...