The Twinkling Trio Demo is Live

And so it ends…

The SuNoFes Game Jam ends in about 14 hours. Since I’ll be at work at that time, I went ahead and submitted my game a little early. The game is just a demo for now, but please play it and let me know what you think (including any bugs you find!). It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

To be honest, I wasn’t able to finish everything I wanted to - largely because once I realized I wouldn’t be able to finish everything before the deadline, my motivation dropped to 0. So I just didn’t touch the game for two weeks, which was like half of the total time I had to work on it.

The end result is a fairly short and simple sample of the game. Story-wise, it consists of about 80% of the first of five acts. It’s more of a tech demo than anything, as it includes most of the programming necessary for the entirety of the game, including procedurally-generated paths for encounters similar to something like Slay the Spire. The big thing that’s missing is the “battle” system, which to be fair is the heart of the gameplay - without it, there’s no “meat”, no progression, no risk or reward.

All that said, I’m happy I had at least something to submit for the game jam. It had been a long time (10 years+) since I seriously worked on a game, and I’d forgotten how much I loved it, so it was great to design and start building a game, even if I wasn’t able to finish it before the deadline.

I do plan to continue working on this game after the game jam. I’ve also joined the Yuri Game Jam which starts at the end of September, but I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll work on the game I had planned for that or spend the time working on this game instead (which I don’t think is a good candidate for the Yuri Game Jam).

My priority is, of course, to get the battle system implemented, but the biggest lift overall will be finishing writing the story. Writing is always the hardest part for me - I’m really critical about my writing, much more so than other things like programming. If I write some code and it works as expected, that’s usually good enough for me and I can move on, but I tend to dwell on my writing and pick it apart until I end up rewriting it 10 times. I’m trying not to do that this time, but… it’s really hard.

Anyway, thank you for your support. If you do end up playing my little game demo, I would really appreciate any feedback you may have. Thanks!