And just like that — another game jam done! Wow.

I just completed Obscure Game Jam #1, a decidedly smaller jam, but the theme turn on the light just felt so doable ("just a binary switch! hOw HaRd CoUlD iT bE?") and i was going through some deep emotional processing and had to find a way to relieve the excess energy. This jam just happened to be there.

This jam was 6 days long (I think?), and my time management breakdown goes as follows:

• Day 1: Create beginning & plan for Mother of Flowers/Bringer of Thorns piece
• Day 2: Restart from scratch, wine & cry night (don't work on game)
• Day 3: Apply to a writing residency & don't work on game at all
• Day 4: Work on game and flesh it out with that good CSS baby
• Day 5: Music generated via AIVA , an AI music generating tool
• Day 6: Final edits, playthrough, and devlog! 

Honestly, it's insane that I got it done at all. It's an admittedly short game, but it's fancy as all hell. My first electronic/playable media piece since I've been taking coding lessons, and I'm so stoked on my new abilities! 

What worked:

I am getting better at CSS! 

And manipulating the code to do more fancy things. Although this piece is lacking in its literary value (it's pretty poorly written, especially for my standards), it pulls some cool CSS tricks. Feels good to be able to actually know what's going on, at least a little bit.

I am getting better at game jams!

The scope of the game wasn't a problem this time around. Even with my super lenient schedule/ time allocation I still finished a day early.

Not only that, I made a title screen, took screenshots, and even made a video clip! All this fancy stuff shows that I've really developed my jam-doing skills. Hell yeah.

I learned that to make all these things (videos, title screens, screenshots, etc), I had to edit the code and intentionally adjust things so they were capturable with a screenshot , rather than just picking a few passages and snapping them.

I also learned (thanks to my new nifty dual monitor set up) that (and this should have been obvious from the get-go) my screen size isn't the only screen size! *surprised pikachu emoji* And this changes how the piece is experienced. 

I found a coding problem I couldn't find the answer to!

I wanted to make CSS changes persist between passages (like you hover over and erase some characters, then do some other things, and come back and it's still erased), but I couldn't find a premade macro for this, and I don't yet have the technical skill to execute it! But finding a problem in itself excites me so much.

When you run into things you can't do, it means you're expanding, and your ability with the medium is expanding. 

This is partially why I was so upset with [mourn]. I felt like I was just doing the same old gimmicks over again — no expansion, nothing new.

I looked on stack exchange and one way to do this is to use JavaScript's sessionStorage, and while I'm currently lacking the skills necessary to execute this on my own, I know that one day soon I will be able to do this! AND THE WORLD WILL BE MINE.

I think I'm getting better at sharing my work!

Even though I had to panic-close some windows when my housemates got too close, I still worked on it in the living room, and I  re-opened e d e n and [mourn] the public!

Shyness is a thing to be pushed against and outgrown.

I'm learning this now. Like honestly FUCK iT it's a thing, it happened, there's no reason to keep being ashamed of it.

What needs work:

I still am incapable of planning out a map before diving into it. 

the first idea I had was to do the whole "bearing for you as the mother of flowers, who the children know as the bringer of thorns" bit (because it's a binary) BUT i scraped the whole idea because writing a piece where two stories can be derived from the same text given some erasures and exposures via a switch button is VERY DIFFICULT. And my point of this jam was to just create something, not tackle difficult literary projects (a task for future me).

so the whole first plan — entirely scrapped.

Glorious Trainwrecks (my literal Twine 1.4.2 savior. (That said, it's also time to bite the bullet and switch over to Twine 2. )) has a cool illuminate letters on mouseover mechanic, which I thought would be perfect for the theme. And given I'm doing loss/attachment processing right now, what's more perfect than a ghost?

A bit cliché, but we took it and ran. This was the result:

This one is schizophrenic in the sense it is additive; I kept appending pieces to it once the basic play-through was done.

The title comes from a quote about Edmond Jabés:

"In a certain sense, he had always been writing from the grave. As his body turns to ash — black ash, his words turn to sand — white sand."
— Mark C. Taylor Williamstown (On Edmond Jabés, via The Book of Margins)

And of course I had to go back in and try and squeeze fistfuls of sand places. I think it worked out overall, but goddamn. If I could just plan better I'd have more time!

Even though it's very fancy, I feel like the meat of the piece is incredibly sloppy and rushed and honestly not the best executed. And even though I technically have time before deadline, I need to move on with my life and just be done with this (for now). There is always time to make improvements later!

Five-day jams are too damn long.

I tend to be a "keep going you're on a deadline who needs sleep we're making GAMES baby" type of person, so three-day jams are perfect. I can not pay attention to anything else, fully commit, and come back to life in three days like Jesus Christ himself.

Five days is harder.

Five days you need to go still do things for work, still go grocery shopping, still do all the daily-life things like hanging out with people and cleaning the house and everything. You can't just put everything on hold. Life goes on, and the jam is just an aspect of it, and not the everything.

I'm not sure what happened but I finished a day early, and I really need to work on other areas of my life now (Work! Eek!) so I can't improve the prose like how I'd really like to. But it's time to move on! This jam is done.

I didn't playtest at all.

AGAIN. There's really no excuses this time. I have housemates who would be down to play it. I'm just embarrassed because it's a fucking game about a ghost. I can't even hide behind the guise of poetry on this one.

I showed everyone the video I made of the clip of it, that's it though. Speaking of:

The part I am most excited about in this game is merely a transition scene.

This means something went terribly wrong! The part I enjoy the most should be seen and experienced by players, not just some weird jump-cut mechanic.

We'll see how others respond to my game, but I think that listening to the part that makes you most excited in creation is a good yardstick on what's "good" or not. Like literally it feels like everything else is filler for this one scene. Which should not be the case at all!

Next Steps:

If I were to redo this game, I would take some of the game-y-ness out of it, and focus on this scene, and scenes like this scene. Make it more poetic.

This scene itself could also use some improvement. Right now it relies mostly on the same hoverrevise mechanic, some timedinserts, and timedremoves. Having different hoverrevise things, more use of the mouseoverErase CSS, and like actually meaning behind these mechanics (what's getting removed with hovers and inserts? what's getting erased on mouseover? what's timing in/out on its own?) to build an actual 'ghost' (or whatever) narrative is a clear next step.

Some more things that I wanted to do but couldn't:

• Actually well-written prose
• Actual narrative
• Actual meaningful second room
• Actual meaningful transition scene mechanics
• **Actual meaningful & meaning-derived mechanics overall
  • Why are things acting how they are on the cutscene? (More intentional mechanics!!!) 
  • Why is it important for folx to hover over the words to "ignite" them? What incentivizes them to do this?
• Actual use of ash and sand symbols (sands of time woulda been neat)
• Actual meaning behind CSS fancy shit
• Actually using the light switch for prosaic (meaningful/semantic) purpose
• Actually having entwined texts (so switch mechanic has meaning beyond narrative)
• Actually using the glitches for meaning
• Actually having a satisfying ending (like at least one LMAO)

Which all can pretty much be captured in:

• Better prose/narrative
  • Clearer story
    • Actual of literary tropes like symbols, symbolism, etc (ways of generating meaning)
  • More poetic/fertile/charged/intentional language & language designs
• More intentional mechanics
  • More intentional CSS fancy shit
  • How does this mechanic contribute (or detract from) the meaning I'm trying to generate in the story overall, and in this mechanical instance in particular (e.g. what do inserts contribute to the 'click' mechanic? is clarifying what's a movement link vs a choice link crucial in this piece (i.e. is there a spatial vs decision distinction here?) and is it necessary to the piece, necessary to the feel of interactivity to the piece (is the feel of interactivity just as good (or close enough) as actual interactivity, or is it just embellishment?) 

In reality, the most (possibly only) salvageable bit from this jam is that transition scene. Which is another thing I've learned from this  — 

Jams are a training ground, not the real work.

Jams are good for discovering new mechanics, the sheer production challenge/pressure, and creating/finding new 'scenes' or specific mechanics that are cool and can be used for future gigs  — they are not good for cultivating finished projects!

Which is just so obvious, but I'm only now realizing it. 

I don't need to revise her body unswept by laughter., it's not one of the projects I'll turn in for grad school apps. Jam-creations aren't the actual thing. They're just like little acid-trips. You gotta get home and do the mediation, the daily work, yourself.

So I will have to get over my addiction to sharing my work with strangers, actually work on a project duratively, and actually share it/playtest it/develop it with the help of my community and peers in real life.