Bone Chasm - Game Jam Submission - Launch!

- WHAT IS 'BONE CHASM'? -

It's our game! Hey, I'm kealmcking, and we submitted this game for the SCREAM JAM 2021 game jam, held in October 2021. We wanted to do a first person, atmospheric / "puzzle" game, but we didn't want to tread the same aesthetic waters as so many other games we had seen. While Medieval, Gothic, or more contemporary settings offer a lot of cool opportunities for storytelling, we felt that there was an overabundance of games in those periods. One period we both love and could not think of any examples of in the genre was 'Wild West'. So, we both clicked with the idea straight away and got to work. It is available now in its "finished" state. More on that later.

- THE JOURNEY -

The jam was a 10 day one, so we knew we had time to flesh the game out a bit, but we also knew it was still an extremely small timeframe. So, we started out pretty small conceptually. You wake up, your horse is dead and you have to head into the nearby mine in order to find some help. After a cave in you proceed forward and find a mining settlement where something is amiss. Find the parts needed to fix the engine that opens the gate and escape the ghost town before dying. And, for the most part we checked all the boxes in our initial concept, even if it took until 5 minutes before the deadline to get there...

Throughout the process we both learned a lot about our individual crafts; kealmcking with Programming and UI, Finzlow with Art, Animation, and Asset creation. We both learned some more optimal (and some more sub-optimal) ways of handling different aspects of game development, and will carry those lessons forward into future projects.

Overall, it was a grueling, stressful but still fun process getting this game into shape, and despite many of its flaws we discovered pre and post release, we are happy with it overall! 

- THE FUTURE -

I can only speak for myself, but after the jam is done and I receive any actionable feedback, I want to spend a few days cleaning up some bugs, making a few features a bit more performant/implementing a few features that were cut, and overall fine tuning the game without a hard deadline in mind. I would also like to switch the game over to URP, so that I can implement some shader effects to make certain objects in the world more noticeable, and finally just add some small quality of life features that I think it should have. Whether the game is worked on at all beyond that is a mystery. We had some areas we had to cut out due to time, but we don't know if it would be worthwhile to re-include them at this point.

Thanks for checking out our game and this dev-log! I plan to make at least one more to document any of the changes I make post-jam. Please let us know what you thought, how we could improve on it, and if you think the game has potential!