Shadowdark 8-Bit Game Jam Diary #4

It's alive!!!

    I finished my entry with two days to spare and I am very proud of myself for getting it all done. This diary focuses on my last few hours of work, cover art, original outline v. actual outcome, and lessons learned. Lets get cracking!

The Last Stand

    Frankly, I was ready to be done with the adventure. I feel like it had taken up so much space in my mind and I could envision it so clearly that other things were suffering from me not getting it out into the real world. I resolved to tackle what absolutely needed to be done and if I had motivation leftover then I could fluff it up.

    What absolutely needed to get done was the keying of the dungeon rooms for Angelo's Head. The map had existed on isometric graph paper since I finished it on the flight out for my vacation so as I transferred it over to Dungeon Scrawler I envisioned myself floating through the dungeon and keyed the rooms. It felt very routine, with little hesitation or waffling on whether or not to include something.

From the cut "Angelo's Body" dungeon

    That section was by far the biggest chunk of unfinished real estate- collecting the monster stats, items, and details on the Steelblade Games were cake. Then it was on to making cover art.

Cover Art

    I was inspired to mimic the Castlevania NES cover art, as Rygar is firmly in the metroidvania category.

    Started off with some pencil sketching, transferred that over to GIMP, line art over it all, colors, and then finally the pixelate filter in GIMP. I am under no illusions about the quality of my art. It's very flat and amateurish- and well- I like it. Maybe one day I'll crack the code and be able to draw in a more realistic style but it wasn't gonna be then.

    Besides, I wanted to stage a cool kind of "culty" looking photo of my adventure on a legit NES cartridge...I feel like I nailed that.

Original Outline v. Actual Outcome

    My aspirations of being able to fit a mini-setting, two dungeons, mini-game, new monsters, items, an ancestry, and new class inside a NES instruction booklet were pretty naive. The big cuts I made were dropping one of the Dungeons (Angelo's Body) and the ancestry and class but there are three or so items that didn't make it into the final product as well.

    Looking back at diary one and two though, I hit everything else. From both the online and in-person reviews I got it feels to me like I accomplished what I set out to do and damn that feels good.

Lessons Learned

    A bunch of "meta" ones like the importance of layout, establishing a solid workflow, realistic scope, and chunking out your work responsibly. I think the biggest thing I learned though is to start with solid inspiration and establish a goal to work towards.

Congratulations to everyone who submitted an adventure!