Development of Accismus


Hello everyone!
I don't know if anyone is interested in this, but I'm still going to post it, becasue why not, and maybe somebody will find this interesting!
Sorry for any spelling errors or gramar, english is not my first language, but I tried my best.

1. Pre-Jam
Before the Jam started I knew only two things: I'm going solo and I will be using UE4. I had some experience with the engine as I'm currently developing a first person puzzle game with UE4, so I wanted to go with the engine that I know the most. One week before the jam started I begun experimenting with a lot of things that I didn't use before, I knew that lighting is a strong side of UE, so wanted to learn as much as possible in this short time to be ready to use it when the jam starts, so I looked up a lot of tutorials about different methods of lighting usage and just created scenes with different methods used. I created a simple twin stick shooter in about 10 hours just to see if I am able to do anything in engine as fast as possible. I tried creating some simple platformers but never finished any. When the engine was up on one screen I always had some videos playing on the other, mostly videos by Jonas Tyroller and Brackeys to get a better grasp on how game jams work overall. On Friday morning I decided to just relax and stop working with the engine until the Jam starts, so I will be fresh and not burnt out, went to shop, prepared a schedule for how I want to work and sleep during the 48h time slot. For me the jam was starting at 21:00 (9pm)
I got onto the discord about 2 hours before theme was announced and spent most of my time there, still watching as many videos about creating games as possible.
When the theme was about to be announced in 5 minutes I played Europe - The Final Countdown at max volume in my headphones, man that got me HYPED! :D

2. Friday 8 PM UK Time - Jam Starts
Theme was announced, I had couple of ideas, some of them even that I was thinking about before even joining the jam, that would fit the theme one of those that I was already thinking about before was a game that would talk about living with depression, others that I came up almost immediately when the theme was announced were "Nature being out of control" and the one that I went with eventually "control by surveillance". I went on to find as many inspirations as possible, going through youtube, my memory and some googling. I really wanted to have the game fit the theme both in terms of narrative and mechanics, so I setteled on player being out of controls idea (yea that sounded original when I came up with it :D) I wanted to go with CMYK color pallete, to make it really contrasting and standing out.
Time to boot up the engine, start a blank project and get to coding. I opted for 5x5 grid with 1 square per click movement (a thing that would haunt me later), the idea for the game right now was that the player has limited ammount of times he/she could press certain movement buttons (how original I know). The first prototype was ready and it looked something like this: 


I made an enemy called Searchlight (that you can actually see when you beat the current version of the game). The searchlights were only moving when you moved, so you had to carefully plan your moves to both be able to get through the level with only couple of inputs and also avoid being caught by the searchlight. I uploaded the protorype to itch as "AGameThatHasNoNameYet" and went to sleep (or atleast tried to sleep).

3. Saturday
Yeah, so I really couldn't sleep well thinking about the game and tried to come up with some fun levels for the game, but I had to make the difficult decission should I continue with idea that I prototyped and think isn't that much fun, or try to come up with something better but lose some time in the process? I decided to change the main idea, I started to look for more inspiration.
After about 2 hours I had everything ready for development.
My main inspirations right now were: Utopia (UK TV Series), Mirror's Edge(the original one), Lara Croft GO (mostly because of GMTK Video, as I never played the game myself) and the most important at this point, one of my favourite games of all time: ANTICHAMBER.
I was analysing some Antichamber puzzles and watched GDC talk by it's developer Alexander Bruce and then the idea that became the main mechanic of Accismus came to my mind, and I immediately started prototyping it. Giving away controls to open doors and solve puzzles was the way to go for me.
My main influences:


Left to right, top to bottom:
Utopia(TV Series): Main narrative and aesthetic inspiration for Accismus 
Mirror's Edge: My secondary inspiration for narrative and presentation (Third level of Accismus is most obvious with this one)
Lara Croft Go: Although I had my camera and movement already in place this served as a confirmation, that something simmilar can wo
Antichamber: Main source of my design philosophy for Accismus, also it's just a must play - go play it

With my core mechanic already prototyped, my main influences and inspirations set in place, a lot of knowlage from videos I watched, schedule that I'm not that far behind, snacks and drinks ready, cucumber slices to treat my eyes if necessary and wonderful music fitting the theme by Polish band Myslovitz mixed in with soundtracks from inspirations listed above in my headphones I was ready to go all in! A lot was already done, a lot still to be done, but you could play through 5 "tutorial levels" already and the build was uploaded to itch. After that I made a list of things that I should add, gave each of those things a priority and was ready to go to sleep. Here's how the game looked on saturday night:

4. Sunday
Again I couldn't sleep too well and that got to me really fast, sadly my Cockatiel woke me up way before my alarm clock :D. Time to eat something quick and get to work. I uploaded some models already on saturday but didn't implement them yet to the game, so I started with that, polished the saturday build and started working on adding some narrative and additional levels. First 5 levels were supposed to be kind of tutorial, and the rest were supposed to test your knowlage (how it worked out is quite different though). Process of designing levels with very profesional tools looked like this:

The polished a little sunday-morning was looking very nice, and had a great aesthetic (atleast for me) but I knew it's not really the kind of look I wanted to go for. It looked like this:

To me the look was really cool and creepy, but as I said it wasn't really the look I aimed for, and it would quickly get repetetive in my opinion. From this point onwards a lot of things were just being added as they came to my mind, with some experimentation and iteration, for example the high reaching walls, that are now a crucial part of the looks were just and experiment for a room where they were supposed to simulate the sky, and some of the colors in level 4 are inspired by the view sunrise from my window. I ended up with the looks that all are fammiliar with about half-way through the day:

My mind and body were really exhausted at this point, and I felt that designing a single level was a really hard and time consuming task so I just focused on trying to polish things out. 2 hours to go, initially I wanted to havethe build ready at 5 pm with the deadline at 8pm, but I had my build "ready" at 7pm and scrambled to implement Main Menu and Ending Screen in hurry (one went okay, the other one we all know how it went :D) Sadly it was 20 minutes till deadline and I saw that in my browser build the player can't enter their name and the graphics become tottaly messed up at some points so I had to go with just donwload version for this jam. Oh... and the name Accismus? I searched for interesting less known words and found out that "Accismus is a feigned refusal of something earnestly desired" and I thought that the word looks and sounds nice and it's meaning is fitting the theme of my game, so I went with it :).

5. Post submission
I started to wrok on the Itch page for the game, proper credits and reading awesome comments from you guys! Thanks to everyone who played the game and I hope atleast one person will find this post interesting to read :) Thank you very much for all the feedback and also very special thanks for everyone who streamed my game live!
I'm very greatful that I was able to take part in this wonderful jam. It was both a very important lesson for me and a huge step that I took.

You should definitely check out:
The games(and one TV series) that I listed as inspirations: Antichamber, Lara Croft Go, Miror's Edge, Utopia (TV Series)
Awesome videos by: Jonas Tyroller, Brackeys and of course GMTK
Wonderful song that was quoted on a wall in my game: Dreamsellers (Eng Version) or Sprzedawcy Marzeń (Polish Version)
Great talk by Alexander Bruce, creator of Antichamber: Antichamber: Three Years of Hardcore Iteration
Great streamers from GMTK Jam Discord: Vertex, SuperSlim, VialoVice, ThetaGC

And one last huge: THANK YOU!

Get Accismus

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